First year, wheat, and after wheat lupins.
Second year wheat, and after wheat turnips.
Third year, Indian corn or millet.
First year, wheat, and after wheat beans.
Second year, wheat, and after wheat lupins.
Third year, wheat, and after wheat lupinella: (annual clover.)
Fourth year, Indian corn, or millet.
In the Syanese Maremna, where the lands want neither repose or manure, the constant alternation is hemp and wheat, and the produce of the latter, often twenty-four bushels threshed, for one sown.
It will be seen from this course of crops, that the principal object of Tuscan agriculture, is wheat, of which they have two species, the one bald, the other bearded; both larger than the corresponding species in other countries of Europe; convertible into excellent bread and pastes, and probably but varieties of that Sicilian family, which Pliny describes, as yielding "most flour and least bran, and suffering no degradation from time." It is harvested about the middle of June and when the grain crop is secured, the ploughing for the second, or forage crop, begins; which besides lupins, lupinella, and beans, often consists of a mixture of lupins, turnips, and flax. The lupins ripen first and are gathered in autumn; the turnips are drawn in the winter and the flax in the spring.
Besides the application of ordinary manures, the lupin is ploughed down, when in flower; a practice that began with the Romans: Columella says, "of all leguminous vegetables, the lupin is that which most merits attention, because it costs least, employs least time and furnishes an excellent manure." The culture of this vegetable is different, according to the purposes for which it is raised; if for grain, the ground has two ploughings and twenty-five pounds weight of seed to a square of a hundred toises: if for manure, one ploughing is sufficient. Like our buckwheat, its vegetation is quick and its growth rapid; whence the farther advantage of suppressing, and even of destroying the weeds that would have infested any other crop. In the neighbourhood of Florence, they are in the practice of burning the soil; which they do by digging holes, filling them with faggots and raising the earth into mounds over them.—The faggots are then inflamed and burnt, and with them the incumbent earth, which is afterwards scattered, so as to give the whole field the same preparation.