Attention has been called to the fact that all of the field crops of
Great Britain, at the time of the English settlements in America,
were broad-cast seeded. The Indians had developed a far different
cultural treatment for their crops. In their most common method, that
of hill planting, the soil in the intervening spaces was not broken.
The hills, two to four feet apart, were from 12 to 20 or more inches
in diameter. The soil in these hills was all that was stirred or
loosened. All weeds, both in the hills and the intervals between
them, were kept cut or pulled out. Four to six grains of maize and
two or three beans were seeded in each hill, separately spaced.
Squashes and pumpkins were sometimes seeded with the corn and beans.
This mixed seeding is a unique feature of American agriculture.
The Indians were fortunate in not having to contend with many of the
weeds, insects and plant-diseases which now plague farmers and
gardeners. Practically all of these pests, some of quite recent date,
are of Old World origin and have been introduced by white men, into
America.
Birds and small animals gave the Indians more concern than all their
other pests combined. It was customary to build in their gardens
small watch-houses in which the young folks took turns in staying to
scare away crows and other troublesome birds.
The same hills were used year after year and became in time quite
sizable mounds, remains of which have persisted, in some localities,
until modern times. In the southwestern parts of Michigan, the early
settlers found large tracts of ridged land, evidently relics of
Indian agriculture. It is now thought that these areas were corn
fields in which the seeding was made in continuous rows instead of
hills. A French artist in Florida in 1564 pictured the Indians
seeding their crops in rows.
After a few years of failure in their attempts to grow American
crops, the English colonists adopted the Indian method of seeding,
but usually neglected the weeding, and were subjected to ridicule for
their shiftlessness by the painstaking squaws. In using work-animals
for cultivating corn, it was found advantageous to destroy the weeds
by stirring the ground in the intervening spaces.