Pay close attention, Tornik, because this lesson really matters for the farmer. He needs to know how to lay out his fields properly and how to divide them. First of all, the boundary of each field has to be marked off from the next, with balks left between them, at least three cubits wide. These balks are never plowed. They always lie fallow. And they are not there just to serve as a road, so the carts can run easily over firm ground. They matter even more for the grass. If the wheat crop is that useful to us, how much more do the working animals need grass? The balks lying along the edges of the fields become a ready-made pasture for the cattle, so the animals, loosed from the gutan,1 find their grazing right there and nobody has to drive them off to distant places. In the old days, and I saw it myself, the balks were wide, because our forefathers were careful men with a conscience. They felt for the animals, they pitied them and looked after them. But in our own time that virtue has been lifted out of the heart of the village people, who only know how to think about their own bread and give no thought at all to the poor animals.
Now do you see, Tornik, how field is joined right up against field, without even one step of space left between them? If one man manages to yoke his gutan before his neighbor does, he will try, in broad daylight and in plain sight, to steal a few furrows from his neighbor's field and fold them into his own. He robs his neighbor's share of soil without a twinge of conscience, he commits a great injustice, and what comes of it is endless quarreling and fighting between the two neighbors.
This is why it matters so much, so very much, that every owner draw a bank around his field and mark out its true boundary. It does more than secure his property. The bank that encloses the field has another use besides. When the field is watered, the water does not run out of it, and when the rains come down hard, the water does not wash across and cut gullies, above all in a field that is not level but ridge and hollow.
There is one more condition of a well-ordered field. The hollow places have to be leveled, so the surface of the field runs even and true from one end to the other. And that is easily done, and not by hand labor alone. Rain and water wash the soil down from the ridges on their own, fill the hollows, and the field levels itself. Only, a bank around the field is not enough. Banks have to be drawn to match the size of the field and the way it lies. Let me explain with a plain example, Tornik, so you take it in well.
Say we have a field two hundred cubits long and a hundred cubits wide, and say it falls away by degrees from the upper end of its length down to the lower end. How do we level it? Very easily, if banks are drawn across it from one side of its width to the other, in two or three places, with an eye to how the steep ground rises and falls. If the ground is very steep, measure off fifty cubits and draw a bank. If the slope is not so sharp, a bank at every seventy-five cubits is enough, and the field is divided into four parts, or three. The banks should be raised a little at a time, and if you work at them every spring and every autumn, you will see the field come level within two or three years.
Eh, Tornik, I know what you are going to say. The field loses a good part of itself to those banks. No. That reckoning is wrong, Tornik. The field loses nothing. In fact it gains a great deal, because its yield doubles and covers the cost of the ground given up. And do the banks bring in no profit of their own? Sow lucerne seed on them and watch how well it does. Its roots hold the bank firm, and you get strong, abundant grass for the winter.
Now let me talk to you about keeping the fields clean, Tornik, which ought to be a standing part of the farmer's work. Whatever stones lie in the fields and get in the way of the plowing and the reaping should always be carried out, with every care. To say nothing of the stones that show on the face of the field, there are big ones under the soil as well, and when the gutan's share strikes them at the plowing, they break it. Then the gutan stands idle until the share has been carried into town and mended, and a good deal of time goes to waste. So it is best to dig those stones out from under the ground wherever they turn up and cart them off the field. Experience has shown that the gutan's shares break for other reasons too, so a capable farmer looks ahead and keeps a second share ready to use when he needs it, and never lets a working day go to waste.
Once the stones are cleared, the tall, savage thorns and the other rank weeds have to be pulled up by the roots and cleared away as well. Remember the parable in the Gospel here, Tornik. The thorns choke the seed, and it bears no fruit.2 Even greater care must go to pulling the tares3 out of the field while they are growing up together with the wheat. At that stage it is very easy to gather them out of the standing grain. It grieves me that the farmers of Van are so careless about this. They let the tares be reaped in with the wheat and threshed with it, and they gather them into the granary together. And do you know how hard it is afterward to sift the wheat and pick the tares out of it? There are many provinces where they make a great occasion of washing the wheat. The whole family goes down to the mill, stays there for days, and washes the wheat with great care, clearing out not only the tares but the small stones and any other stray seeds. Then they grind, and the bread comes out unmixed and perfectly clean.
But there is an easier way to part the tares from the wheat. Pull them beforehand, out of the standing field, before the reaping, when the tare rises in tufts as high as the wheat and begins to set its ear. I am told that the hardworking families of Kharberd4 set us the example. They go out into the fields at the right season and draw the tufts of tare out whole, and the wheat grows all the stronger for it, because with every self-sown weed, the more of it that springs up in a field, the harder it presses down and saps the growth of the seed we have sown. It is a strange thing, Tornik, that these self-sown, untended weeds grow the stronger and the healthier. Wise men have a saying that self-born plants count as the mother soil's own true children, and that she feeds them more freely with her milk and her sap, while the seed we sow counts as stepchildren. But the natural strength of the mother soil is impartial, equal toward all plants alike. She obeys the natural law that God has laid down. She is not like the mothers of this world, who love only their own children and hate the stepchildren, hate them outright.
Would you like to know, Tornik, what the natural cause of this is, and why we want to weed the foreign grasses out of our tilled ground?
I wish I could explain the cause to you like a man of science. But the people have learned by experience that the self-sown weeds are ruthless enemies of the seed we plant. They grow taller and stronger, they overpower our plants and choke them, and they will not let them grow and gather strength. So the people weed them out by the root, and then you see the sown plants begin to grow quickly.
Now learn, Tornik, the inward and natural cause of it. It seems to me that the thinner the plants stand, the more strongly and quickly they grow, because they take in more sap and nourishment from the mother soil. They suck up the share of sap that would have gone to the plants weeded out, and they thrive on it. A proverb the people use puts the idea plainly. The thin-set onion grows the big head. And is there not a more natural example still? When our mother bears twins, the milk of her breasts is divided between two children. But when she bears just one child, the milk of both breasts is left to the newborn alone, and the nursing child, drinking more, grows stronger. That is enough about keeping the fields clean. It is time now to speak about the richness of the soil, which will increase the farmer's profit and his earnings, if he knows how to put to work everything that gives the soil its strength and its richness.