Plowing Videos

A quick one of a hand plow pulled by two draft horses.


Here’s a three-horse team tearing up a field. There are some good shots of the sod being turned over and of the smooth, flat path the plow has left behind.


A close up of what is happening to the soil during plowing. It’s done with modern equipment, but shows very well what is happening to the ground.

The Truth About Plows

OK, so the simplest plows are nothing more than a blade attached to a frame that can be pulled by people or animals. They have been around since pre-historic times and function like I mentioned yesterday -- they carve a shallow scratch or furrow and leave an undisturbed strip of ground between the furrows. So several passes over the field, usually at right angles to each other, were necessary to fully ‘till’ the land.

The heavy plow is more complicated and does much more. It consists of four main parts, the coulter, the plowshare, the moldboard and one or more wheels at the front of the plow.

The coulter is a vertical blade that cuts into the turf. It creates a slit in the ground that the plowshare can get into to do its work.

The plowshare is an iron or steel piece of the plow that dips under the sod and has a horizontal blade that cuts the earth parallel to the top of the soil. It essentially cuts out the top layer of the ground in one long strip and feeds it up to the moldboard.

The moldboard is a curved board that takes the turf cut by the plowshare and pushes it to the side, at the same time flipping it over. This takes that strip of sod and inverts it, dirt-side up off to the right side of path of the plow. All of the grass and weeds are now root-side up and are effectively buried under inches of earth.

The last important piece of the heavy plow is a wheel or set of wheels, whose height can be adjusted, which allows the farmer to set the depth at which the plowshare is cutting.

This is obviously much more work for the animals pulling the plow than the scratch plow. The horizontal blade of the plowshare is dragging through the ground 4-8 inches under and encountering a lot of resistance. In his book, Medieval Technology and Social Change, Lynn White Jr. talks a lot about the ramifications of the adoption of the heavy plow, making these important points:

• That the plow required the pulling force of 8 oxen
• That these large teams of oxen required a lot of effort and coordination to turn around, which changed the shape of fields to long strips
• That few farmers could afford 8 oxen of their own, so peasants had to form alliances in order to come up with enough animals to pull the new plows
• And that with this change came an essential change in philosophy: whereas peasants had once held an amount of land theoretically able to produce enough food to feed themselves, they now held land in proportion to how much they could contribute to the plow-team. Man was now no longer part of a natural cycle, he was now part of a ‘machine’ that exploited that cycle.

Unthinkingly Plowing Through Life

You know, it’s amazing how when you think you know how something works, you stop paying attention. Whenever the subject comes up in a book or whatever, the brain just turns off and says, “I already know this, I don’t have to pay attention any more.”

An example of this has come up this week in regards to the wheat project. I’ve been thinking a lot about my little 115 square foot plot and all the weeding I’ve had to do. If it took me 2 hours to weed 115 sq. ft., that would mean it would take me 758 hours (63 12-hour days) to weed an acre.

I’ll admit that I’m slow and that this is the first time in my life that I’ve really done this, so with the sort of practice makes perfect that you get from doing a job all your life let’s say that you could cut that time down by a factor of five (which is probably generous). Even then it’s taking you two weeks to weed an acre that will then need to be re-weeded after a one or two week’s worth of time. That means that one person would be continually weeding a half or a full acre.

So during the season, a family of four (ages 10+) would be doing little all day but weeding 3 acres. That does not pass a reality check. Or it just barely does if you take the few acreage figures in the polyptychs, and cut them in half, figuring them to be fallow. But only barely. And even though it may have been possible, that doesn’t mean it was done or that it even needed to be done.

I could also be doing things wrong. In an effort to save the wheat and the newspaper’s integrity, I have not been using a trowel or other tool to try and get out the weeds’ roots. This is certainly making me weed more often, but since the newspaper technique isn’t historically accurate, the problem remains, probably on a larger scale since the newspaper is actually working in large areas.

Let’s go back to my initial paragraph. I’m not a farmer, nor have I ever spent any time on a farm. I have always known that fields get plowed. I know that the scratch plow used in the Mediterranean world was unsuitable for the heavy soils of northern Europe. I know that in the second-half of the first millennium AD a newer, iron-shod or iron-constructed plow was invented and revolutionized farming in the north. But I never really thought about what that meant to the ground.

It’s particularly funny/odd/disconcerting because I’ve just finished re-reading Medieval Technology and Social Change and it has my highlights in the section on plowing, so I really have no excuse for not having internalized this information.

I know that seeds need to go in the ground to grow. So I figured that was what a plow did -- made furrows in the ground for seeds to go in. But, as I am discovering in my own back yard, it’s not that easy. What about the wild grasses and weeds that are already there? Surely you’re not pulling those out by hand?

After a little bit of research, I have been educated as to what a heavy plow with a moldboard really does. And I will discuss that, tomorrow.

Planting Wheat -- 9 weeks in

I have my first ear of seeds in the Red Wheat!





The close-up is a bit blurry, but hopefully you can see the grains there. I examined them just the day before and I swear there was nothing there. I really think that those all grew in 24 hours (48 tops!).

Here’s a look at the whole plot:



Some small few have grown tall while most of them are still just grass-like little clumps.

My bucket of winter wheat had been stagnant for a while. Nothing had changed, no new ears of grain had appeared. Then in the middle of last week I watered the bucket on a whim and now there has been quite a bit of growth. Every single stalk has seeds now, even one stalk that had fallen over and was laying down flat.

Roman _Libum_

So I made the Libum last week. The recipe that was in Around the Roman Table: Food and Feasting in Ancient Rome was pretty weak, but I was able to play with it and fill it out. Here’s what I did:

Ingredients:

• 1 2 lb. container of Ricotta Cheese ($4 at my local mega-mart)
• 2 pounds of whole wheat flour (I weighed it out and then forgot to measure that in cups) I only wound up using about 1 1/3 lbs. of it.
• 1 egg
• 1.5 teaspoons of salt
• 2 tablespoons of melted butter

Dump the Ricotta into a large mixing bowl. Add the salt and the egg. Stir in as much of the flour as you can before your arm gets tired (or be smart and use a mixer -- I didn’t think it would get that stiff). Pour the mixture into a greased bread pan. Smooth the top with a spatula and perforate the top many times with a fork. Brush on the melted butter. Cook in a 350 degree oven for 1 hour. The dough will rise a small amount and brown on the top.

The family had a few slices that night and were quite pleased. The taste is subtle and mild, and it has a dense cheesecake-like texture. The next day I took the leftovers to a small party and everyone enjoyed it. Many thought it needed something to spice it up -- strawberries, cheesecake and chocolate were suggested. Another friend commented that he thought it would be good to slice up and deep fry.