The hills all prepared, I went back and planted them, patting down each with my palms, as described. Planting corn thus by hand was slow work; but by ten o’clock the morning’s work was done, and I was tired and ready to go home for my breakfast and rest; we did not eat before going into the field. The ten rows making the morning’s planting contained about two hundred and twenty-five hills.
I usually went to the field every morning in the planting season, if the weather was fine. Sometimes I went out again a little before sunset and planted; but this was not usual.
The very last corn that we planted we sometimes put into a little tepid water, if the season was late. Seed used for replanting hills that had been destroyed by crows or magpies we also soaked. We left the seed in the water only a short time, when the water was poured off.
The water should be tepid only, so that when poured through the fingers it felt hardly warmed. Hot water would kill the seeds.
Seed corn thus soaked would have sprouts a third of an inch long within four or five days after planting, if the weather was warm. I know this, because we sometimes dug up some of the seeds to see. This soaked seed produced strong plants, but the first-planted, dry seeds still produced the first ripened ears.
If warm water was not convenient, I sometimes put these last planted corn seeds in my mouth; and when well wetted, planted them. But these mouth-wetted seeds produced, we thought, a great many wi´da-aka´ta, or goose-upper-roof-of-mouth, ears.
It was usual for the women of a household to do their own planting; but if a woman was sick, or for some reason was unable to attend to her planting, she sometimes cooked a feast, to which she invited the members of her age society and asked them to plant her field for her.
The members of her society would come upon an appointed day and plant her field in a short time; sometimes a half day was enough.
There were about thirty members in my age society when I was a young woman. If we were invited to plant a garden for some sick woman, each member would take a row to plant; and each would strive to complete her row first. A member having completed her row, might begin a second, and even a third row; or if, when each had completed one row, there was but a small part of the field yet unplanted, all pitched in miscellaneously and finished the planting.