PeterH vomitted:
"Why? That seems a very speculative piece of speculation from a guy who prides himself on his scientific approach."

:o)

To be fair I did sprinkly my text with plenty of maybe's and perhaps's, principally because I wasn't really talking about crops. The main point of my posting was that they didn't necessarily have a calendar that required leap year compensation, which after all was how the tolpic started. The use of crops to illustrate that point was merely a convenient reference back to the previous posting. Making love or killing a goat would have served my purpose just as well. I certainly wasn't atempting to argue that farmers needed, or even heeded a calendar, though I don't rule it out either. There are certainly examples of such superstitions still being practiced. Who knows how far they may date back?

There was an old winemaker in Beuajolais that I knew in the 1980's who would only bottle his wine according the the ancient tradition of the area on a day when "the wind is in the west and the moon is on the wane".

(It might actually have been the east; I don't remember. So don't ask me to bottle any wine for you. I don't mind sampling it though!!)