Pay close attention, Tornik. Let me first describe to you, briefly, what these small-grained seeds are, and what great hidden powers they carry. The Lord God prepared them wondrously, once and for all, at the creation of this world, and wrote them into the womb of mother earth. It amazes a man, how the grains conceive, and sprout, and come up out of the soil, and grow day by day until they are as big as a tree, as Jesus says in his parable about the mustard seed, which grows so big that the birds come and rest in its branches.1
Do you see? The whole globe of our natural earth is full of seed sown by God's creating hand. All the forests, all the fruit trees, the flowers, the grass, the different garden plants, everything that grows, has come up out of grains of seed. So give glory to God, and kiss his providing hand in your spirit. He gave man this earth as an inheritance, as capital that never runs out, and along with the earth he gave the seeds of every sort and kind. If he had given only a dry and barren earth, with no seed in it, what would have become of man? He could not have lived at all, because our food and our life are what the earth grows from seed.
We do not know, Tornik, at what point in time man, with his ingenuity, chose the seed of wheat over everything else for his food. He sowed it and reaped it. At first he boiled it in water and ate it as grain, but later, with his inventive wit, he ground it in the quern and it became flour. From the flour he kneaded dough, shaped it into little rounds, baked it on the fire, and it turned out to be excellent bread. Today the greater part of the whole world lives on bread, and if the bread runs out, a man starves. There are, though, lands and peoples that do not live on bread, and it is a strange thing, because if they eat bread it does them harm. They eat rice instead of bread, and live on other things. It seems a man can live on whatever he is used to, the way the forest savages live on fruit and the meat they hunt. That is all I need to say in general about the seeds that were prepared for us from the beginning. And do you see, Tornik, how our daily life hangs on seed, and above all on the bread-grain? Now I have to talk about choosing that precious seed, because everyone knows that other, alien seeds get mixed in with the wheat, stepchildren, self-sown offspring of the mother soil, which come up without ever being sown or tended, the tare, the chllek,2 and the rest. The sowing laborer must not only separate those alien seeds from the wheat, he must pick out the thin and shriveled grains too, sifting and cleaning again and again until only clean grains are left, plump and full.
As for the sowing itself, the farmers of Europe today have invented various clever machines that sow very evenly, so the grains fall in the field at an even distance from one another, come up evenly, and take an equal share of nourishment from the mother soil.
Doesn't it astonish you, Tornik, that trial and skill have worked out how much soil a single grain needs, to feed it and keep it alive until harvest?
But it is plain that fields which have gathered strength lying fallow, or have been fattened with dung, can take and hold much more seed, just as a rich man can keep many children in plenty. So the experienced farmer, who knows exactly where his field is strong and where it is weak, sows his seed accordingly, thick or thin, and he is right to do it. Can a mother with no milk feed two children instead of one? We can set the sowing machine aside, Tornik. For us, at least, it would be very hard to use right now. The hands of our seed-casters are skilled enough for the sowing, and the handful is their measure. When a man wants to sow thick he fills his fist full, and when thin he tightens his fist and holds it in.
Ah, Tornik, something has just come to my mind. Let me tell it to you. There was a time when the village people were very devout. At sowing-time a man would first carry his seed to the village priest to be blessed, and only then begin to sow. Blessed be the Fathers of our ancient church, they did not forget this either. They composed a prayer for the blessing of the seed too, in the order of the Mashtots.3 I have often had our priest bless the seed for me, and reading the prayer he would say, "Bless, O Lord God, the seed and the sower. You are bountiful in your gifts, and you give seed to the sower,4 though without seed you can bring bread out of the earth, and without food fill the hungry," and so on. Our forefathers were simple-hearted like that, and full of faith. Seed, field, granary, vineyard, wine-press, every crop and every fruit, they had them all blessed, and they set aside the tithe-portion for the priest, and for the monasteries as well.
But leave the blessing of the seed. If I tell you the rest, Tornik, you will be amazed at the devout fervor of the master of the house at his sowing. From the day the sowing began, he did not come home from the field again. He slept out under the open sky, and his bed for the night was the furrow of his own field, until the sowing-time was finished. You should have seen how he began. First he pulled his belt tight. Then he took up handfuls of the seed and poured them in at the open breast of his shirt, filling his bosom on both sides right up to his armpits. Then he made the sign of the cross on his face and began to sow the field. The work of sowing lasted twenty and thirty days, long enough for the grains in the sower's bosom to sprout, because the sun beat on his bare chest and warmed them, and from within, the laborer's sweat wet them like dew and drew out their shoots. And this was taken as a good omen for the fruitfulness of the sown fields. You know, Tornik, that at plowing-time there are the calls that hearten the yoked animals. In just the same way, the sower has the murmurs of his own mysterious prayer.
Do you see, Tornik, how many portions the fruit of our labor goes into? But never let that discourage you. The more the portions, the more abundantly God gives. The farmer's earning is blessed with fullness and does not run out, so long as the farming people, under the protection and care of the state, can work their land in quiet and in safety and make it yield by their tireless labor. And the state knows very well that the great spring of its treasury rises out of the working people's field. The better that people is sheltered under the state's outspread wings, the fuller that spring will flow.
Let me not forget, Tornik, a little more about the season and the timing of the sowing. Sowings commonly fall in two seasons, spring and autumn, which is to say April and September. In our province of Vaspurakan, and likewise in Upper Armenia,6 in Alashkert, and in some of the high-lying districts of Mush, spring generally comes late, and sometimes drags on into May, so the spring sowing does not do well, because the rainy weather has passed by then. It is a great piece of luck for the farmer if spring comes early and he can finish the spring sowing within March or at the beginning of April, while the rains are not yet over, so the seed, already in the ground, can come up quickly and gather strength.
Our farmers have no great hopes for the spring sowing, so they sow little of it. The greatest part of the sowing is always the autumn sowing, which usually begins in the middle of August and goes on until October, and sometimes past it. It is best for the plowed fields to be sown from September on. It has been proved that the fields sown first do better. They shoot and come up quickly, take root, and gather strength while the sun's strength has not yet slackened. They green well until the snow comes at the end of autumn and covers them, and as soon as spring arrives the wheat-stalks grow and rise and set their ears. After some three months, in the first days of July, the sickle goes into the harvest, because 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 one sowing more, which they leave to the very end of autumn. They sow it when winter is nearly on them and the ground is freezing, so the grains of seed neither shoot nor come up but simply lie in the soil without growing. The moment spring arrives they come up at once, ahead of the spring-sown, since they are already sown and ready, the seed softened and shot, while the spring sowing, what with the rains and the weather, does not come up quickly every year.
I think that is enough, and I will write no more about the choosing of seed and the sowing. Now I will talk about water, and about the watering of the fields, which is one of the necessary means to a plentiful crop.
Notes
- Matthew 13:31-32. ↩
- Chllek, a field-weed of the Van country, growing of itself among the wheat. ↩
- The Mashtots, the Armenian Church's book of occasional rites and blessings, named for St. Mesrop Mashtots. ↩
- Cf. Isaiah 55:10 and 2 Corinthians 9:10, "seed to the sower." ↩
- Matthew 13:8, the yield of the good ground, a hundredfold, sixtyfold, thirtyfold. ↩
- Upper Armenia (Bardzr Hayk), the historic province around Karin (Erzurum). ↩