PALLADIUS RUTILIUS

A joyful, green, and sterile branch in the middle of an olive tree must be cut away, as an enemy to the whole tree. Sterility and pestilence must be avoided in equal measure. In soil prepared for planting, nothing at all should be interplanted among young vines. The Greeks advise that, except for cabbages, in the third year, one may graft what one wishes. By the authority of the Greeks, all legumes are ordered to be sown in dry ground: only the bean should be scattered in moist ground. A master or tenant who possesses bordering lands, and who rents out his own farm or field, is intent on his own losses and lawsuits. Inside the field, things are in danger unless the edges are cultivated. All wheat in marshy soil is changed into the variety of siligo fine wheat/winter wheat after the third sowing. Three evils are equally harmful: sterility, disease, and a neighbor. He who occupies sterile land with vineyards is an enemy to his own labors and expenses. Plains yield wine more generously, hills more nobly. The North wind makes vines facing it fertile; the South wind makes them noble. Thus, it is in our power whether we have more wine, or better. Necessity knows no holidays. Although sowing should be done in temperate fields, yet if there is a long drought, seeds harrowed into the fields will be preserved more safely than in granaries. The malice of the roads is equally adverse to pleasure and utility. He who cultivates a field suffers a creditor heavy with taxes, to whom he is bound without hope of release. He who leaves raw soil between the furrows while plowing detracts from his fruits and defames the fertility of the land. A cultivated smallness is more fertile than neglected magnitude. Reject black vines entirely, unless in provinces and of that kind from which it is customary to make acinaticium a type of grape-must or wine made from whole grapes. A longer support produces the growth of a vine.