The fields are seldom large and they are never regular in shape. An acre here, a few acres there, they dot the mesa tops, the rich red soil standing out sharply against the green cover of the vast “green table.” The heavy snows of winter have filled the earth with moisture which will carry the crops through the dry, hot weather of early summer. Then the late summer rains will come and the worries of the farmers will be over. Many of the men like to farm in the low draws above the heads of the canyons. There is deep, rich soil there and a concentration of moisture that produces the finest crops. Such draws are not large but they make excellent farming areas. The men even enlarge them by building terraces where the draws are too narrow and steep for normal farming. Low dams of stones are built across the drainage, seldom more than three or four feet high and twenty or thirty feet long. The heavy rains of summer wash rich soil from the mesas and deposit it behind the dams. Soon each one becomes a terrace large enough for a few hills of corn, beans or squash. Sometimes there are as many as a hundred of these terraces in a single small draw. In a dry year, when the plants on the mesa tops die from lack of moisture, these terraces usually produce a crop. Even a slight rain causes water to drain down across them and they assure a small harvest. The early spring work consists of clearing the trash and weeds out of the fields and stirring up the soil for planting. Dead weeds are pulled out of the ground and burned and the first green weeds of spring are prodded out of the soil with digging sticks. Some of the men even begin to stir up the soil where they will later place the seeds. Corn is sometimes planted almost a foot in the earth so each hill requires a great deal of effort. The plants grow better if the soil is loosened up so the men select the spots for the hills and begin to dig up the soil and turn it over. The only tool is a digging stick, a slender hardwood limb that has one end sharpened into a chisel-like blade. Small digging sticks may be only an inch screen in diameter and a foot in length but the large ones are sometimes three inches in diameter and five feet long. The upper end of the large ones is rounded into a knob that serves as a handhold and near the base may be a prong so the foot can be used in forcing the blade into the soil.