the most of their customs are directly traceable to their religion.
They learned to cultivate and fertilize corn from the Indians, also beans, pumpkins, artichokes, etc., and themselves introduced wheat, rye, buckwheat and barley from the mother country. The custom of seeding worn fields to grass in order to recuperate originated in New England and seems to be the particular contribution the Puritans made to the art and science of agriculture.
The quasi communal customs of log rollings, house-raisings, husking bees and quilting parties, together with spelling matches and literary societies and singing schools seem to be typically New England productions, arising not only out of their common religious bond, but out of the economic fact that there was practically no non-land-owning laboring class. Hence co-operation in the things too heavy or too tedious for one man and his family became a custom of their communities.
In the matter of plowing, the plowman usually went about breaking up the land for his neighbor, and in some towns a bounty was paid to anyone who would buy a plow and keep it in repair so that the neighborhood plowing could be done. Their other tools were the harrow, the spade, the hoe and a clumsy wooden fork.
Cattle raising never became a large industry in New England on account of the difficulty of securing forage for beef cattle, but dairying did become important, the foundation for their herds being imported from Denmark about 1633. Little attention was paid to horse breeding, as oxen were the principal draft animals, though a breed of pacing horses
