Farming by the book

[Dove Brown]

32 Winter 515

It was snowing again, and little to no field work available until it stopped. Dove opened the window anyway to let the meagre light of a grey wintery day into her cottage and leaned out to watch the snow. One flake landed on her nose and she almost went cross-eyed trying to see it melt. Withdrawing into her cottage, she fetched the book she'd found when she was ploughing in the Fall. She'd managed to clean up its battered, blackened cover and tarnished metal corners, but she hadn't, until now had time to study it more closely. She settled herself cross-legged on the floor in the best light, wrapped herself in a blanket for warmth, and reverently opened the book. The printed letters were small and cramped to fit into the small pages, and hand written notes in at least four different handwritings filled the margins around the printed text. The first page had the title "A Farmer's Almanac". Underneath, someone had scribbled a season-rhyme:

When the stones shine green
New growth is seen.

When the stone shines yellow
Hear the animals bellow

When the stone shines red
Cut the crops down dead

Then when the stone shines blue
The harvest will see us through.


Dove ran her finger along the words to help her keep track. A whole book about farming? She knew there was more to it than just the labour she lent her back and arms to doing. You also had to know when to plough and sow so that the crops came ripe before the weather killed them, and when and what to feed them - and a host of other things. Perhaps this book would tell her? Perhaps that had been why the book was out in the fields and not safely locked away. She flicked through the pages, finding that it was divided into five main sections, a general overview, and then one for each season. Each season was headed by its lines from the season-rhyme at the front. She turned back to the overview. "A farm needs both animals and plants to do well," she read, her lips whispering the words as her finger traced them, "both for the working of fields and for keeping them in good order." A handwritten note beside it told her that pigs were best for digging out stubborn roots. Another claimed sheep were better for breaking up heavy soil. "A field should be rotated between tall grain and low vegetables for soil likes variety, and grows bored with a single crop. Crops on bored fields grow less well. Fields should also be left fallow every few years and used as pasture to let the soil rest from its work." In the handwriting there seemed to be a debate into which grains and vegetables grew best, complete with crossed out areas. Dove peered closely at it. There was something about wheat and winter, and then something about oats and yield. She couldn't make out the details. She'd come back to it when she had better light, she decided, and paged gently forward to the first of the seasons.

[Dove Brown]

Spring

Like the rhyme, the seasons in the book began with the beginning of the year. There was a small pen and ink image of a man ploughing with oxen, and Dove flexed her own hand, remembering the jolting feel of reins and plough both together. "Spring is for ploughing, harrowing, and sowing crops," she read, and in the margin ran tiny lists of the best early (peas, onions, flax) and late (wheat, corn, cabbages, carrots) crops around Syliras, "for the calving of cows, the farrowing of pigs, and the pruning of trees.

Some of this, she realised, would also relate to gardening if - when - she found somewhere to grow a few things. The planting times, especially for the vegetables. A crop was a crop whether in garden or field. And digging for a garden was like ploughing the field - only on a much smaller scale. And no horses involved. She grimaced, remembering her attempts to handle Gloss, and the ways that horse caused her problems. Horses were necessary. She had vaguely understood that much, but this book made it much clearer how much depended on having animals to pull the ploughs, the harrows, the carts and all the other field tools. Ploughing - well, she'd done that. Badly. Harrowing was the same kind of thing, only the horse pulled a harrow to break up the larger clods of earth instead of a plough. There was, however, a clear difference between farms and garden when it came to sowing. Dove's fingers itched to add her own reminders to the margins - not that there was much room left for them - but for now she made do with a mental note. With a garden, you dibbled - you made rows of small holes with a dibbling stick, then you set the seeds in the holes one by one, and covered them over. You had to plan out your hole and how close together they were, so that the plants couldn't choke each other as they grew. With a field, you mostly scattered them and tried to get an even coating on the ground. Corn meant rows, she remembered, and careful lines, so they must be garden style, whereas wheat just grew where you broadcast it.

Both kinds of seeds had to be defended. Which meant weeding and weeding, and scaring birds away, and weeding, and then weeding some more. If she was a knight of defending crops the way Nivel had declared, then her enemies were birds and rabbits and weeds. Though for her, spring weeding had also always been a chance to snatch extra food in a lean season. Some of the weeds were edible themselves - young nettles, dandelions, chickweed. Sometimes you got multiple sprouts from the same hole, and could snatch one as you worked and leave the other. Either way, it filled out the stores that were lean from winter, and put food on the table and in your mouth.

[Dove Brown]

Summer

Summer followed spring in the book, just as it did on the land. "Summer," the almanac said, "is for the cutting and making of hay, for the shearing of sheep and the weaning of lambs, for the breeding and pasturing of cows, and for the fertilising of fields." There was a long complicated sum written very carefully in the margin that claimed to be a way of working out cow breeding so that the calves appeared at the same time as the new spring grass, but it was too difficult for Dove to follow or see if it was true, so she skipped over it. She skimmed through the different recomendations for fertiliser with a grimace and brushed her shirt down as if it remembered the stuff falling on her. It had been seasons ago, but she hadn't forgotten. Why should the shirt have done so?

Haymaking was a safer subject, and she dived eagerly into that section, tracing the lines of print with a finger and bending to peer at the notes. She knew, in a way, that you needed a stretch of dry days all in a row - she'd been told so all her life - but here for the first time were explanations as to why. Hay was left in the fields for a reason. It had to be absolutely, totally, dry before it could be piled into a haystack and stored that way for winter. If it wasn't completely dry, it got hot inside the haystack. Hot enough to eventually burst into flames and destroy the entire stack - and there went a batch of winter feed. It needed the sun to dry - and the effort to toss and turn it so it dried evenly - so if it rained, you had to start all over from the beginning. Once it was dry and in a haystack, it was safe because the outside of a haystack got thatched for weather protection.

Dove remembered the yearly haymaking as a time when she wasn't singled out for being in the fields because the entire Outpost was out there in the fields trying to get the hay cut and dried and stacked before the weather changed. Even the knights were more interested in getting a good harvest of winter feed for their horses than in ruling the roost and making sure everyone knew who was in charge. And in exchange for everyone working, there was often food supplied. Better quality food than she or family would get otherwise, so despite the work haymaking was something of a holiday. Her mouth watered at the memory of some of those feasts and she set the book aside gently, unwound herself from the blanket, and set some dried peas to soak for later. She checked her other stores to see whether she was short of anything, looked out of the window at the snow, and eased herself back into the semi-nest she had made for herself.

[Dove Brown]

Fall

Once wrapped in the blanket again, she picked up the book once more and turned the pages. Sure enough, the next season was Fall. "Fall is for the harvesting of spring crops and the sowing of winter crops," she read, though she knew that part already. "For the culling and slaughter of animals not worth feeding through the winter and for the preservation of food." Harvest time and the feast that followed was a major highlight in her year. There were things like fresh beef and pork that she never ever got at any other time of year. They were, and had always been, more than she could afford to pay even for just herself, let alone the entire family.

Harvest itself though - it was a bit like hay making in that everyone turned out for it, but there were downsides to that as well. People chattered at harvest. At least, she thought with a grimace for the memory, they chattered until they discovered you weren't like them, Once they did find out, the niceness fell away and they either verbally attacked you, or they snubbed and ignored you. Both hurt. She wasn't sure which hurt more, and she'd never been able to find anyone willing to explain why being different was such a problem that folk would hurt you over it.

She hunched tighter in her blanket as a bit of snow swirled in from outside, and tucked one cold hand inside her shirt to warm up. Once it had, she switched hands and bent to study the neat diagrams that showed how to kill and joint an entire cow or pig or sheep. It would probably be messier than the book made it sound. Most things were. No one talked about dust that got inside your clothes as you bound sheaves of grain during harvest - or about how much it itched and irritated. No one talked about hands covered in manure when they talked about fertiliser and fertilising fields. She'd felt that dust, held that manure. She knew the fields and the weather from long, long hours spent out there in them in all weathers. The book was good but it missed out on little details, the tiny things that turned farming from a dry necessity into a living breathing world. It was as if whoever had made the book in the first place had never actually worked in a field. As if they had only watched and recorded, like a knight on horseback, while farmers worked on the ground around them.

The next page she turned to was smudged with mud. Clearly the book had opened a crack at some point while it was in the ground, and the dirt had got in here. She made a mental note to come back and clean it as best she could at some later point. The little she could make out appeared to be a dicussion on the merits and differences between scythes and sickles. Which might be interesting. Or not, as the case may be.

[Dove Brown]

Winter

Winter made the end of the book and the end of the year. "Winter is for the making and mending of tools and equipment, for the tending of animals and for indoor tasks." A few snowflakes fluttered through the window, reminding her just why it was indoor tasks so much of the time. They melted in the slightly warmer room - it wasn't much with the window open, but that was a compromise she had to make between light and warmth. Firelight wasn't enough to read by, and she wasn't about to spend money she could ill afford on lamps and candles when there was perfectly good daylight available courtesy of Syna.

Early winter there might still be threshing or winnowing to do, or other tasks to preserve late fall harvests, or digging up clamped root vegetables. Carting, fence-mending, and laying of hedges - what few hedges there were - on the dryer days. It was rarely warm enough to repair walls. But mostly it was replacing handles and grinding out nicks in a sythe blade, or scrubbing inside walls if there was any of that left to do. Then there were animals to feed and groom and clean out in a never ending stream, and new buckets and sickles and scythes and knives and trowels and shovels. Which in turn meant cutting wood and carting coal, and manure, and straw, and hay, and oats in another never ending stream of work. Though some of it was beyond her skill, she did often end up diging or carrying something or other. They probably expected her to be looking after her own tools, but what few she owned were all dealt with. Except that knowledge was a tool too, so in a way she was sharpening that and making it better to work with next year.

She looked on and found tables of dates, plotted against holidays, suggested tasks, and expected weather. The paes there were heavily creased and thumbed but with fewer hand written note than the rest of the book. Out of curiousity she flicked through the winter section to see if it said anything special about her birthday, but didn't find anything. Part of her wasn't surprised, even though it would have been nice to think her birthday was special - it wasn't and neither was she. Just one more farmer, who knew jut barely enough to realise how much she didn't know at all. She had a feeling she'd be consulting and re-consulting this book for a long time to come. If she could just keep it secret and hidden for long enough to absorb everything in it.... she closed the book possessively and stroked the battered leather cover, feeling the hardness of the wooden boards beneath ... maybe then she could write another one. A better one that didn't make her think more of a scribe's desk than the soil beneath her feet and the plants she could twine her fingers though.

[Hwyn]

[center]XP Award!

Name:Dove Brown XP Award:

• Butchering 1
• Farming 3
• Agriculture 1
• gardening 1
• Archeology 1

Lore:

• Butchering, the basics of quartering.
• Farming: The importance of Seasons
• Farming: The importance of dry hay
• Agriculture: Theories on crop rotation
• Archeology, maintaining old books.
• Goals: Write a better book

Notes: I liked reading it, I can totally relate to curling up with a book and relaxing thoughout the afternoon. Anyway I think I've done alright to generalize the lores you would have received from the book. But if their were any specifics you wanted Pm me and we can probably work something out.