VII. The Choosing of Seed and the Sowing

Give good heed, Tornik. Let me first describe to you in brief what they are, these small-grained seeds, wherein great hidden powers are contained; which the Lord God, at the creation of this world, wondrously prepared once for all, and wrote into the bosom of mother earth's womb. A man marvels how the grains conceive, sprout, and come forth out of the soil; how they grow day by day, and wax great as a tree — as Jesus speaks in his parable of the grain of mustard, which grows so great that the birds rest upon its branches.¹

Do you see? — the whole globe of our natural earth is full of seeds sown by God's creating hand. All the forests, all the fruit-bearing trees, the flowers, the grass and the divers garden herbs, and every growing thing, have come forward from grains of seed. Here give glory to God; kiss in spirit His fore-providing hand, which, giving this earth to man for an inheritance and for unfailing capital stock, bestowed together with the earth the seeds also of every sort and kind. Had He given only a dry and plantless earth, without seed, what would man's state have been? He could no longer have lived; for our food and our life are the seed-growths of the earth.

We know not, Tornik, from what time the ingenious man, for his food, chose above all else the seed of wheat. He sowed it and reaped it; at the first, seething it in water, he ate it as grain; but afterward, by his inventive wit, he ground it with the quern, and it became flour; of the flour he kneaded dough, and shaping it into little rounds he baked it upon the fire, and it became excellent bread; and today the great part of the whole world lives by bread — if bread fail, man dies of hunger. Though there are such lands and peoples as live not by bread; and it is a wonder — if they eat bread, it harms them; in bread's stead they eat rice, and live by other things besides. It would seem that man can live by the things he is used to, as the forest-dwelling savages live on fruits and the flesh of the chase. Speaking only this much, in general, of the fore-prepared seeds, it is enough. And have you seen, Tornik, that our daily life hangs upon the seeds — above all upon the bread-grain seed? Now must I speak of the choosing of that precious seed; for it is plain that with the wheat seed other alien seeds mingle, which are stepchildren, self-sown offspring of the mother soil, and spring up without sowing or tillage — as the tare, the chllek,² and the rest. The sowing laborer must not only part those alien seeds from the wheat-grain; he must single out even the lean and dried-up grains, sifting and clearing again and yet again, so that the clean grains remain, plump and full.

For the sowing: the husbandmen of present-day Europe, it is true, have invented divers ingenious machines, which sow very evenly, and the grains fallen in the field lie at an even distance one from another; whereby they spring evenly, and in even measure take their nourishment from the mother soil.

Do you not marvel, Tornik, that the trial of craft has shown how much soil is needed for the growth of a single grain — to nourish and keep the grain of seed until reaping-time?

But it is plain that those fields which have gathered strength lying fallow, or are fattened with dung, can receive and keep much more seed — as a rich man can keep many children in plenty. Therefore the tried husbandman, knowing well his field's strength and its weakness, sows his seed accordingly, thick or thin; and he is right: can a mother that has no milk nourish two children in the place of one? Let us leave the sowing machine, Tornik, for us at least it were now very hard to use; the hand of our seed-casting laborers is skilled enough for the sowing: the handful is his measure of proportion — when he would sow thick, he fills his fist full; and when thin, straitening his fist, he holds it in.

Eh, Tornik — here a thing came into my mind; I remembered it; let me tell you. There was a time when the village people was very devout: at sowing-time a man first carried the seed to the village priest to be blessed, and then began to sow. Blessed be the Fathers of our ancient church — they did not forget: for the blessing of the seed too they composed a prayer, in the order of the Mashtots.³ I too have many times had the seed blessed by our priest, who, reading the prayer, would say: "Bless, O Lord God, the seed and the sower, Thou who art bountiful of giving in gifts, and Thou givest seed to them that sow;⁴ though without seed Thou canst bring forth bread out of the earth, and without food fill the hungry" — and so forth. So simple-hearted were our forefathers, and full of faith: seed, field, granary, vineyard, wine-press, and all their crops and fruitage they had blessed, and set apart the tithe-portion for the priest, and likewise for the monasteries.

Leave the seed's blessing: if I tell you, Tornik, you will marvel at the devout fervor of the sowing master of the house. From the day the sowing began, he came home no more from the field, but stayed under the open sky; his night's rest was his field's furrow, until the sowing-time was fulfilled. You should have seen how he began the sowing: first of all he girded his belt fast; taking a handful of the seed, he poured it in at the open breast of his shirt, filling his bosom on both sides down to the armpits; then, signing his face with the cross, he began to sow the field. Twenty and thirty days the labor of the sowing lasted — until the grains in the sower's bosom sprouted; for the sun, beating upon his bare breast, gave them warmth, and from within, the laborer's sweat, like dew, moistening the grains, put forth their shoots. And that thing was counted a good-boding sign of the sown fields' fruitfulness. And do you know, Tornik — as at plowing-time there are the calls that hearten the yoke-drawing beasts, so the sower too has the murmurs of his own mystery-laden prayer:

Do you see, Tornik, into how many portions the fruit of our labor goes? But be not you disheartened: the more the portions, the more abundantly God gives; for the husbandman's earning is blessed with fullness, and is not spent — if only the plowing people, enjoying the protection and care of the state, may till the land in quiet and in surety, and make it fruitful by its unwearied labor. And well the state knows that the great spring of its treasury wells up out of the laboring people's field: the better that people is sheltered under the state's outspread wings, the fuller yet flows the treasury's spring.

Let me not forget, Tornik — a little more upon the season and the time of sowing. Sowings commonly fall within two seasons, spring and autumn — that is, the months of April and September. In our province of Vaspurakan, as also in Upper Armenia,⁶ Alashkert, and some high-set districts of Mush, spring generally comes late, and sometimes drags on till May; whereby the spring sowing does not prosper, for the rainy seasons pass by. It is great fortune for the husbandman if spring come early, and he can finish the work of the spring sowing within March or at April's beginning — so that, the order of the rains not yet past, the seed, being in the soil, may spring quickly and gather strength.

Our husbandmen have no great hope of the spring sowing's success; therefore they sow but little then, and the greatest part of the sowing is always the autumn sowing, which commonly begins from the middle of the month of August, and lasts until October, and sometimes beyond. Best it is that the plowed tilths be sown beginning from September; it is proved that the fields sown first prosper the more: they shoot and spring quickly, and striking root they gather strength, while the sun's strength is not yet abated; they green well until, at autumn's end, the snow comes and covers them; and with spring's coming the wheat-stalks grow and rise, bind their ears, and after some three months, at the beginnings of July, the sickle enters the harvest — for the autumn-sown seed ripens earliest of all, and the spring-sown is the last harvest of all.

Besides the spring sowing and the autumn sowing there is yet another sowing, which they leave to the end of autumn: they sow then, when winter's onset draws near, and the ground freezes, so that the grains of seed neither shoot nor spring, but lie so in the soil without growth; and as soon as spring comes, they spring up at once, before the spring-sown — for they are sown already and ready, the seeds softened and shot — whereas the spring sowing, by reason of the rains and the weathers, does not prosper every year so as to spring quickly.

I think it is enough, writing this much only of the choosing of seed and of the sowing; now I shall speak upon water, and the watering of the fields, which is one needful means of the plenty of crops.