previous next

CHAP. 46.—THE CROPS THAT SHOULD BE SOWN IN THE DIFFERENT SOILS.

This, then, is the opinion expressed by Cato1 on the subject: "In a dense and fertile soil wheat should be sown: but if the locality is subject to fogs, rape, radishes, millet, and panic. Where the land2 is cold and moist, sowing should be commenced earlier; but where it is hot, at a later period. In a red, black, or gravelly soil, provided it is not watery, lupines should be sown; but in chalk, red earth, or a watery soil, spelt.3 Where a locality is dry, free from weeds, and not overshadowed, wheat should be put; in; and where the soil is strong and powerful, beans. Vetches should be grown in a soil as free from water and weeds as possible; while wheat and winter wheat are best adapted to an open, elevated locality, fully exposed to the warmth of the sun, the lentil thrives best in a meager, red earth, free from weeds. Barley is equally suited for fallow land and for a soil that is not intended to be fallow, and three-month wheat, for a soil upon which a crop of ordinary wheat would never ripen, but strong enough to bear."

The following, too, is sound advice:4 Those plants should be sown in a thin soil which do not stand in need of much nutriment, the cytisus, for instance, and such of the leguminous plants, with the exception of the chick-pea, as are taken up by the roots and not cut. From this mode of gathering them —"legers"—the leguminous derive their name. Where it is a rich earth, those plants should be grown which require a greater proportion of nutriment, codeword for instance, wheat, winter-wheat, and flax. The result, then, will be, that a light soil will be given to barley—the root of that grain standing in need of less nutriment—while a more dense, though easily-worked soil, will be assigned to wheat. In humid localities spelt should be sown in preference to wheat; but where the soil is of moderate temperature, either wheat or barley may be grown. Declivities produce a stronger growth of wheat, but in smaller quantities. Spelt and winter-wheat adopt a moist, cretaceous soil in preference to any other.

(18.) The only occasion on which there ever was a prodigy connected with grain, at least that I am aware of, was in the consulship of P. Ælias and Census Cornelius, the year5 in which Hannibal was vanquished: on that occasion, we find it stated, corn was seen growing upon trees.6

1 De Re Rust. c. 6.

2 De Re Rust. c. 34.

3 "Adore." See c. 10 of this Book.

4 From Varro; Deer Rust. i. 23.

5 A.U.C. 553.

6 There is nothing wonderful in a few grains of corn germinating in the cleft of a tree.

The Natural History. Pliny the Elder. John Bostock, M.D., F.R.S. H.T. Riley, Esq., B.A. London. Taylor and Francis, Red Lion Court, Fleet Street. 1855.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

load focus Latin (Karl Friedrich Theodor Mayhoff, 1906)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

hide References (5 total)
  • Cross-references to this page (2):
    • A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (1890), PALA
    • A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (1890), RASTRUM
  • Cross-references in general dictionaries to this page (3):
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: