WORKS.
55
Of ploughing-time the sign[1] and wintry rains:
Care gnaws his heart who destitute remains
Of the fit yoke: for then the season falls
To feed thy horned steers within their stalls.
Care gnaws his heart who destitute remains
Of the fit yoke: for then the season falls
To feed thy horned steers within their stalls.
- ↑ Of ploughing-time the sign.] Of the first ploughing Hesiod says, ειαρι πολειν: turn the soil in spring; of the second, θερεος νεωμενη, ploughed again in summer; the summer tilth: of the third αροτον: by which he invariably means the seed-ploughing, when they both ploughed up and sowed the ground. Salmasius in Solinum, 509.
Robinson quotes a passage of Aristophanes: Birds, 711:
The ploughing first mentioned by Hesiod is, then, actually the last. It appears that he recommends ground to be twi-fallowed: or prepared twice by ploughing before the seed-ploughing. Virgil directs it to be tri-fallowed, Georg. i. 47:"Sow when the screaming crane migrates to Afric."
Fallowing, or ploughing the soil while at rest from yielding a crop, prepares it for the growth of seed by pulverizing it, exposing it to the influences of the atmosphere, and destroying the weeds: and is of essential use in recovering land that had been impoverished and exhausted by a succession of the same crops. The practice of fallows seems, however, to be now in a great degree superseded by that of an interchange of other crops in rotation; and the succession of green or leguminous plants alternately with the white crops or grain: the frequent hoeings, in this mode of tillage, cleaning the soil no less effectually than fallowings.Deep in the furrows press the shining share:
Those lands at last repay the peasant's care,
Which twice the sun and twice the frosts sustain,
And burst his barns surcharged with ponderous grain.
Warton.
