Chapter 8 Bean Field
Walden bean fields.
At this time, the beans I had planted, if added up to seven miles in rows, were already 7 miles long, and they urgently needed to hoe and loosen the soil, because the last batch had not yet been sown, and the first batch had grown very tall;Indeed, it really can't be delayed any longer. I don't know the meaning of this Hercules-style little labor, but I work so hard and value it so much. I fell in love with my rows of beans, even though they were far more numerous than I needed. They connect me to the land, so I'm like a giant in Antaeus Greek mythology. His strength is infinite, and as long as he maintains contact with the earth, he is invincible. The same got the power. But why should I plant them?Only God knows. All summer I did the wonderful toil—to clean up the skin of the earth, so that the earth, which had previously grown only berries, dogtails, blackberries, and the like, and sweet wild fruits and beautiful flowers, was now allowed to grow beans. What should I know about beans, and what can beans learn from me?I love them, I loosen the soil and hoe them, I take care of them all day long, that's what I do all day. The wide leaves are so beautiful. The rain and dew helped me moisten this dry soil. Much of the land is barren and depleted, and the soil itself is not fertilised. My enemies are bugs, cold weather, and especially groundhogs. Groundhogs gnawed away 1 4 acres of beans. But what right do I have to remove plants like dogtail and destroy their garden of herbs since ancient times?Luckily, the remaining beans will soon be very strong enough to deal with some new enemies.
I vividly remember being taken from Boston to my current hometown when I was four years old, past this forest and this field, to the lake. This is one of the earliest scenes of the past that is etched in my memory. Tonight, the sound of my flute evokes the echoes of this same lake. The pine tree still stands there, older than I am;Or, some have been cut down and I use their roots to cook, and new pine trees have grown around them, giving a new generation a different sight to the eyes. In this pasture, almost the same dogtail grass grows from the same long-standing roots, and even I later add a new coat to the beautiful scenery of my childhood dreams, and one of the effects of my return can be seen in the leaves of these beans, the pointed leaves of corn, and the vines of potatoes.
I planted about two and a half acres of hillland. It's been about 15 years since the land was cleared, and I dug out two or three "cowder" roots, so I didn't fertilize it. On some days in the summer, I picked up some arrows as I hoeed the ground, and it seems that in ancient times, before the white men came to cut down, there was a vanished ancient people who lived here, and who had planted corn and beans before the white people cleared the land, so that, in a way, they had exhausted the ground for these crops.
Before any marmot or squirrel could cross the road, or before the sun climbed up the oak grove, and the dew was everywhere, I began to level the weeds that were growing in my bean fields, and to cover them with dirt, though some farmers had cautioned me against doing so—but I would advise you to finish all your work while the dew was dry. Early in the morning, I worked barefoot, like a stylist, mud in the soft dew-soaked sand, but a little later, after three poles of sun, my feet were blistered by the sun. The sun shone on me to hoe the beans, and I walked slowly to and fro on the yellow sandy hill, among the rows of green foliage that stretched at one end to a low oak forest, and I often rested in its shade;The other end stretched to the edge of a blackberry field, and with each walk I walked back and forth, I could always see that the green blackberries there had deepened slightly. I remove the weeds and plant new soil around the beanstalk to help the crops I grow grow, so that the yellow earth can express its summer thoughts through bean leaves and bean flowers, not with absinthe, reeds and dogtails, and let the earth speak through the beans, not through the grass – that's what I do every day. Because I didn't have the help of cows, horses, hired hands, or children, and I didn't have the help of improved farming tools, my work was particularly slow, so I became more intimate with the beans. But working by hand, even to the point of hard labor, may not be the worst form of wasting time. There is an eternal and indelible truth in the midst of this, which for scholars has a classical philosophical connotation. For those travelers who traveled west through Lincoln and Weiland, to places no one knew about, I became an agricolalaboriosus Latin for toiling farmer. up;They sat leisurely in the two-wheeled carriages, their elbows resting on their knees, and the reins hanging loosely in a faux decoration;I'm a laborer working in the dirt and staying at home. Soon, however, my family and land were out of their sight and thoughts.
Because there is a long stretch of land on both sides of the road, my land is the only cultivated land, which naturally attracts their attentionSometimes the man who works in the field, hears the gossip and comments of the travelers, which he does not intend to hear: "The beans are planted so late!"Peas are so late!"—Because when I started planting, others were already hoeing the ground—something that I had never thought of as a half-way monk. "This corn, my child, can only be eaten by domestic animals!Corn for livestock!"Does he live there?The man in the gray shirt and black hat asked;So the grim-looking farmer reined in his grateful old horse, and asked me, what are you doing here, and when he saw that there was no manure in the furrow, he suggested that I scatter some fine garbage, or any little rubbish, or ashes, or mortar. However, there were only two and a half acres of arable land, only a hoe instead of a horse, drawn by two hands—I don't like other wagons and horses—and the fine garbage was found far away. Some of the travelers who traveled in groups, as they drove by, loudly compared the field with what they had seen along the way, and this gave me an idea of my place in the agricultural world. This field is not included in the list of Mr. Coleman, Henry Coleman, who in 1837 authorized a survey of agriculture in Massachusetts. From 1838 to 1841, the state published four detailed reports written by him. report. But, by the way, who would estimate the value of the crops that nature produces on more inhospitable ground that have not been cultivated?England hay was carefully weighed, the humidity and silicate and potassium carbonate in it were also calculated;But in all the valleys, depressions, woods, pastures, and marshes there was an abundance and variety of grains, but they were not harvested. As for my fields, it's like somewhere between the wild and the cultivated;Just as some are civilized countries, some are semi-civilized countries, and some are barbaric countries, although there is no bad meaning in this, my field can be called a semi-civilized field. The beans happily returned to the wild and primitive state in which I had cultivated them, and my hoe sang pastoral songs for them.
Nearby, at the top of a birch tree, there is a brown singing finch – some call it a red-browed bird – that has been singing all morning and is happy to be with you. If your farmland isn't here, you'll find that it's going to fly to another farmer's field. When you sow the seeds, it sings: "Drop it down, drop it down, throw it down - cover it, cover it - pull up, pull up, pull up." "But this is not corn, and there will be no natural predators like it to eat the crops. You may wonder if it's a nonsense song, like an amateur paganini with one string or 20 stringsPaganini, an Italian violinist and composer. What does it have to do with your sowing? But you'd rather listen to the music than prepare the filtered ashes or plaster. These are the finest fertilizers on which all my faith rests.
When I used my hoe to dig up new soil by the furrow, I also turned up the ashes left behind by a people who were not recorded in the annals. These peoples have lived under this sky in ancient times, and their small ** for war and hunting has seen the light of day again. They were mixed with other natural stones, some of which still bear traces of fire for the Indians, others sun-burned, and some pottery and glass, which are supposed to have been left of modern cultivators. When my hoe clangs against the stones, and the sound of ** echoes through the woods and the sky, my labor has such an accompaniment that produces an immediate and incalculable harvest. I'm not planting beans anymore, and I'm not growing beans. I remembered with pity and pride, and if I did, some of my acquaintances went to the city to ** the oratorio. And on this sunny afternoon, the nighthawk hovered over my head—I sometimes worked all day—like a speck of dust in my eye, or rather a speck of dust in the eye of the sky. From time to time, it swooped down and screamed, and the sky seemed to be torn apart, and finally torn into strips of rags, but in the end, it was still a seamless garment. There are many little elves flying in the air, and they leave their eggs on the ground, on the yellow sand or rocks, on the top of the mountain, but few people can see them. They are like ripples rolled up by the water of a lake, beautiful and slender, and like fluttering leaves that blow the wind into the air;In nature, there is such a relationship of like-mindedness. The goshawk is the air brother of the waves, it soars above the waves, and its perfect wings flutter in the air, as if in response to the wingless force of nature in the sea. Sometimes I gaze at a pair of harrier eagles hovering high in the sky, up and down, near and far, as if they were the embodiment of my own thoughts. Or I was fascinated by a flock of wild pigeons, and watched them fly from one grove to the next, with a slight flapping of their wings. Sometimes I dug out with a hoe a lazy, ugly and strange salamander from under the rotten stump, a remnant of Egypt and the Nile, but now it is our contemporary. When I stopped, leaning on my hoe, these sounds and sights that I could hear or see anywhere in the furrow were part of the endless pleasure that village life had to offer.
On festival days, a cannon salute is set off in the city, and the echo sounds like ** in the forest, and sometimes some military music wafts in from afar. I was far away in the bean fields, and to me, listening to the sound of the cannons in the city was like a horse bug bursting;Once, when I was out of the army without my knowledge, I felt vaguely all day the symptoms of the horizon as if it were about to have measles, maybe scarlet fever, maybe horseshoe cancer, until then a gust of wind blew across the earth and onto the Weyland Highway, bringing me the news of the "trainer". There was a buzzing sound in the distance, as if someone's bees were flying out of their nests, so the neighbors, following Virgil's method, struck the loudest pot with a thin bell hammer and tried to drive them back to the hive. By the time the sound had died down, the hum had ceased, and the most empathetic breeze had stopped telling stories, I knew that the people had driven the last drone back to Middlesex's hive unharmed, and now they were thinking about the honey that covered the hive.
I am proud to know that freedom in Massachusetts and our homeland is so safely protected;When I re-farmed, I was filled with indescribable self-confidence, and with confidence in the future, I continued to do my labor happily.
If there were a few bands, the whole village would have become a bellows, and all the buildings would open and collapse in turn. But what came to the woods from time to time was a truly sublime and exciting melody, and the trumpets played with honor, and I felt as if I could raise a knife to a Mexican—why should we always tolerate trivialities?So I looked around for marmots and weasels, hoping to show my chivalry. The melody of this military music was as distant as it was in Palestine, reminding me of the crusaders marching on the horizon, like the elm treetops hanging over the village, swaying and trembling slightly. Although I looked up at the sky from the glade of the forest, it was no different from every day, the same endless sky. However, it was a great day.
Working with beans for a long time, I gained a very unique experience with planting, hoeing, harvesting, fielding, picking, and the last one was especially difficult – I would add one more to eat, and I did taste the beans. I was determined to understand beans. When they grow, I often hoe from 5 o'clock in the morning until noon, and the rest of the day is usually used for other things. Consider, the fact that people can still make friends with all kinds of weeds to a very intimate and strange degree—which is strange and annoying to talk about, because there is a lot of repetition in labor. Destroy one grass with a hoe, mercilessly destroy its delicate tissues, carefully distinguishing them in order to grow another. It was Roman absinthe—it was pig grass—it was sorrel—it was reed—and it was plucked out, and its roots were turned up, and it was basked in the sun, leaving a fiber in the shadow, or else it would get up on its side, and after two days, it would be green like a leek again. It was a long battle, not against cranes, but against weeds, against a group of Trojans with the help of the sun and rain. Beans saw me every day with hoes to defend them, gradually destroying their enemies, and filling the trenches with dead grass. There were many flying helmets and strong first warriors of Hector Troy, known as the "walls of Troy". In the end, he duel with Achilles and die at the hands of the other party. , a foot taller than the horde of companions, all fell to their knees in front of my ** and rolled into the dirt.
During the summer months, some of my contemporaries devoted themselves to fine art in Boston or Rome, others in India, others in London or New York, and I devoted myself to farming, like other farmers in New England. It's not that I want to eat beans, for I'm a man by nature sent by Pythagoras to give life to the crops, and the land is the logic of all labour, and our toils on the land feed us, and all the manure and other filthy things are but substitutes for improvement in this regard. Moreover, this land is only "depleted, abandoned land that is enjoying the Sabbath", presumably like Sir Digbai, the British ruler and philosopher, who discovered the necessity of oxygen for plant life. I have thought about it, and I have absorbed the "vitality of life" from the air. I harvested a total of 12 bushels of beans.
However, in order to enumerate some of the items in greater detail, and because of the complaints that Mr. Coleman reported mainly on the cost-free experiments of farmers with status, I have set out my income and expenditure as follows:
A hoe ......054 USD.
Ploughing, raking, and ......$705.
Bean seed ......$3125.
Potatoes are planted ......$133.
Pea seed ......040 USD.
(Tips: The full text ** can be read by clicking on the card at the end of the article).
Radish ......006 USD.
The fence is white and the line is ......002 USD.
Ploughing horses and 3-hour hired ......$100.
Horses and carts were ......used for harvesting075 USD.
Total ......$14,725.
My income is Latin for "the head of the household" should be good at selling and should not be just concerned with buying. Come from.
*9 bushels, 12 quart beans......$1694.
5 bushels of large potatoes ......$250.
9 bushels of small potatoes ......$225.
Grass ......$100.
Stems ......075 USD.
Total ......$2344.
Surplus ......$8715.
This is the result of my experience with beans: on June 1st, plant the usual small, white beans in rows at 3-foot-long, 18-inch intervals, carefully selecting the fresh, round, unadulterated seeds. First of all, be careful of pests and replant in areas where there are no seedlings. Then beware of marmots, if the field is unobstructed, they will gnaw the young leaves that have just grown in one goAnd, as soon as the tender tendrils extend, the marmots notice that they sit upright like squirrels and nibble off the buds along with the newborn pods. Most importantly, if you want to avoid frost and sell the beans easily, you should harvest them as early as possible, so that you can avoid many losses.
I also gained further experience: I said to myself that next summer I would not have to be so diligent and desperate to plant beans and corn, but seeds of honesty, truth, simplicity, faith, innocence, etc., if they were not lost. I'm going to see if they can grow on this land, even with less labor and fertilizer, to see if they can sustain me. Because, the strength of the earth must not have reached the point where it is exhausted by crops. Alas!I have said this to myself, but now, another summer has passed, and one after another, I must tell you, my readers, that if all the seeds I have planted are the seeds of these virtues, they will all be eaten by the worms, or they will lose their vitality, and all will not grow seedlings. Human bravery can usually only be like that of their ancestors, and so is cowardice. This generation was convinced that the corn and beans planted each year were the same as those planted by the Indians centuries earlier, and that they had taught them to the colonists who first came, as they should have been. One day I also saw an old man, and to my surprise, he dug a hole with a hoe at least 70 times, and not so that he could lie in it himself!But why shouldn't the New Englander be bold enough to try something new and focus too much on his corn, potatoes, and forage and his orchard?- Why not plant something else?Why do you always care about the seeds of beans and not the new generation of humanity in the slightest?If we meet a man and are convinced that we see in him the qualities that I have mentioned, which, though we cherish more than any other product, but most of which are scattered in the air, but which take root and grow in him, then we should be satisfied and happy. An elusive and ineffable virtue, such as truth or justice, though few in number and a new variety, is yet along the road. Our ambassadors should be instructed to send some of the fine varieties back home, and then our Congress will be responsible for assisting in distributing them throughout the country for planting. We should not be hypocritical when dealing with sincerity. If the essence of nobility and friendship appears before us, we should never again allow our meanness to deceive each other, insult each other, and ostracize each other. Nor should we be in such a hurry. Most of them I haven't seen at all, they don't seem to have time, they're busy growing their beans too. Let's not deal with such busy people, who are always working hard;During breaks in work, leaning on a hoe or shovel, like a mushroom, only part of it rises from the ground, not just upright, like a swallow resting and ,——walking on the earth
As he speaks, his wings spread from time to time.
It's like flying, but it's coming together—" from the fifth ode to the English poet Francis Quarles' The Language of the Shepherds.
In this way, we mistakenly think that we are talking to an angel. Bread may not always nourish us;But it will always benefit our body, even when we don't know what disease we have, remove the stiffness in our joints, make our body soft and light, and let us find kindness in nature and society, and enjoy any pure and noble joy.
Ancient poems and myths at least suggest that farming was once a sacred art, but we pursue it with ungodly eagerness and recklessness, and our goal is only to have a large farm and a good harvest. We have no festivals, no parades, no celebrations, not even the so-called Cattle Gathering and Thanksgiving, which the peasants originally used to express the sacred meaning of this profession, or to trace the sacred origin of farming. What attracts them now is the reward and the feast. Now he did not sacrifice to the goddess of grain, Cheris, not to Jupiter, but to the evil god Plutus, the god of wealth. Because of the greed, selfishness, and groveling Xi that none of us can get rid of, and the land is regarded as property or the main means of acquiring it, the landscape is destroyed, the farming becomes as inferior as we are, and the peasants live the most humble life. What he knows about nature is not much different from what a robber knows. Cato said that the benefits of agriculture were very reverent and upright, and according to Varro, the people of ancient Rome "considered the land to have the same name as the god Ceres, and they believed that the people who worked in the fields lived a reverent and beneficial life, and that they alone were the remnants of King Saturn, the god of agriculture." From Varro's "On Agriculture".
We are accustomed to forgetting that the sun shines on the fields we have cultivated and on the grasslands and forests indiscriminately. They all reflect and absorb the sun's rays, which are only a small part of the beautiful images that the sun sees on a daily basis. To the sun, the earth is cultivated like a garden. Therefore, we should accept its light and heat with the same trust and generosity. Even if I value the seeds of these beans, what if I have a harvest in the autumn field?I have gazed at this vast field for a long time, but it does not regard me as the main cultivator, but sets me aside, and approaches the friendlier influences that water it and make it green. I can't reap all the beans. Aren't some of them grown for marmots?Wheat. So, how can we have a bad harvest?Shouldn't we rejoice in the abundance of weeds?Because the seeds of the weeds are the granaries of the birds. In contrast, whether the production of the fields filled the farmer's warehouse or not is a trivial matter. Real farmers don't have to worry about this, just like the squirrels, who don't worry about whether chestnuts will grow in the woods this yearThe true peasant, who toils all day without claiming that the produce of the land belongs to him, gives not only the first fruit, but also his last fruit in his heart.
(Click on the card above to read the full article.)
Thank you for reading, and if you feel that the recommended book meets your taste, please feel free to leave us a comment!
If you want to know more exciting content, pay attention to your continuous recommendation!