Seeking Ferret

Kilayim 4:1

This perek is about planting other seeds in a vineyard. There is a separate explicit prohibition on kilayim in vineyards in the Torah in Devarim, we read it in the parsha last week, so the Mishnah understands that the rules regarding vineyards are stricter and different compared to other kilayim. Grapes have a spiritual centrality in Judaism that leads to them having special rules, additionally I think their vininess is significant given how much concern the Mishna seems to have about the appearance of two plants intertwining. So if you have a bunch of grapevines together, you need extra space to avoid kilayim, and the whole concept of what distinguishes a few grapevines from a vineyard is crucial.


The Mishna defines two kinds of empty space in a vineyard- a karahas, and a mehol. A karahas is an empty spot in the middle of the vineyard, a mehol is the gap between the vines and a fence/boundary. The questions the Mishna is interested in with these regions is 1)how big is big enough that you can plant another crop in the middle of the area and maintain enough of a gap to not have kilayim, obviously, but also 2) how big is so big that even though you own the whole property, it's actually considered two vineyards from a halachic point of view.

Beis Shammai teaches that the answer for 1 is 24 amos for a karahas and 16 amos for a mehol. Beis Hillel teaches 16 amos for karahas and 12 for mehol. Another way of thinking about this is that all agree that you need an open four amos between grapes and the other plant, and Beis Shammai thinks you must have enough room to be able to plant a 16x16 area of the other species, and Beis Hillel thinks you must be able to plant an 8x8 area of the other species.

Kilayim 4:2

The Tanna Kamma affirms we hold by Beis Hillel.

Kilayim 4:3

R' Yehuda holds that the area between the vines and the fence is just part of that boundary, not a mehol, and even if it's over 12 amos you can't plant seeds there. He says what is meant by mehol is that if you have 12 amos between two sets of vines and no fence, it counts as two separate vineyards and you can plant seeds in between. Thus R' Yehuda permits planting even if you have room for only a 4x4 area.

For something to be a fence and legally create a border it must be ten tefachim high, just as in eruvin.

Kilayim 4:4

If you have a fence made of individual reeds, and it has a gap big enough that a chad gadya could fit through it, it's not a valid fence for kilayim purposes. If you have a solid stone fence, a gap that big would be considered a doorway and not nullify the fence, but if it's more than 10 amos it's a breach and no longer valid. But if there is more 'doorway' than wall, it doesn't matter that individual gaps are less than 10 amos, it's still invalid.

Kilayim 4:5

If you have a 'vineyard', as opposed to just some grapevines, you need extra space around it for access to handle the plants and that extra space expands the boundary of kilayim. That I think calls back to perek 2 and the idea that within a certain plot of planted land, even certain uncultivated areas counted as part of the cultivated area. And also to the general idea that the rules for vineyards should be stricter. Beis Shammai defines vineyard as a single row of grapevines, at least 5 plants. Beis Hillel defines vineyard as two rows of grapevines. As a result, Beis Shammai holds that if you plant kilayim next to your vineyard, it renders one row of your vines closest to the other species prohibited to hanaah, and Beis Hillel holds two rows are prohibited to hanaah. The language the Torah uses is kadesh, but it seems to be metaphorical/analogic, just as you're prohibited to use hekdesh, you're prohibited to use this kilayim grapes. It's not actual hekdesh.

Kilayim 4:6

If your rows in your vineyard are not the same length, it's still all one vineyard as long as the rows are continuous, but if there's a gap in one row, they don't combine.

Kilayim 4:7

If you have two rows of vines close to each other, but there is a shorter than ten tefachim fence between them, or a narrow path between them, even if the path is a property line and one of the rows belongs to a neighbor, they still count as a single vineyard and you need more space around them. I know we said in an earlier perek that there's no prohibition of kilayim between neighbors, but that is derived from the pasuk in Vayikra, whereas the pasuk in Devarim that covers vineyards does not make that distinction.

Kilayim 4:8

If you have two rows of vines, they don't combine into a single vineyard if the space between rows is more than 8 amos, so you can plant another seed in between. I'm not really sure how this meshes with the first mishna in the perek.

Oh, I think I have it. 4:1 is about an area that is already combined as a vineyard, so it's less than 8 amos row to row, but then there is a gap within it, and that gap must be 16 amos. But here we are only talking about individual rows that are not combined into a vineyard because they are spaced more than 8 amos apart.

The same is true if you have three rows of vines and 16 amos of spacing, meaning less than 8 amos row to row times two combines. If you had three rows and less than 16 amos of spacing, and then you knock down the middle row, you might think that now you have the first case, but R' Eliezer Ben Yaakov says in the name of R' Chanina Ben Chachinai that in this case you can't plant because having formed a vineyard it remains a vineyard even when some plants go away.

Kilayim 4:9

We now discuss a vineyard with much more than three rows. As long as you maintain 16 amos between rows, they don't combine into a single vineyard, so you can plant seeds in between rows as long as you maintain a one amah border. R' Yehuda teaches that in Tzalmon, a farmer did this and alternated every other year pushing the tops of the vines one way or the other and planting other seeds in the opposite direction, doing some sort of crop rotation. The chachamim permitted this. R' Meir and R' Shimon say they would have been fine even with 8 amos between rows, so I think they're arguing on 4:1.

Kilayim 2:1

If you have a bucket of seeds and the majority of them are one min, and a few of them are another min, does the majority nullify the minority? Apparently D'oraysa bitul works, but the Rabbis add a fence. If there is more than a quarter of the second min, you have to pick out seeds until you have less than a quarter. But wait! When we say a quarter, we don't mean a quarter. Artscroll handily explains here, but otherwise you wouldn't figure out until a few mishnayos later, we are evaluating this in terms of a se'ah of seeds, and within that se'ah, a quarter kav is the smallest unit we are interested in doing math on. There are 6 kavin in a se'ah, so actually we are saying if you have less than 1/24th of a se'ah in your se'ah, you are okay, and if you have more than 1/24th of a se'ah, you need to pick out seeds.

R' Yose holds that if you have less than a 24th of a se'ah, bitul works just like the Tanna Kamma, but as soon as you have more than 24th, you need to completely pick out the seeds, not just reduce below a 24th, because he thinks there is a perceived kavanah to plant kilayim if you don't get rid of all the seeds once you're aware of them. This idea of perceived kavanah seems to be a recurring one in this whole perek.

The final machloket is between R' Shimon and the Chachamim about whether or not two kinds of minority seed that are each less than a quarter kav combine to count as kilayim. So if you have a se'ah of wheat that has an eighth kav of oats and an eighth kav of rye, do you need to pick out seeds? R' Shimon says no, the Chachamim say yes.

Kilayim 2:2

Here we say that the previous rule only applies to classes of seeds. Less than 1/24th nullifies grain with grain, less than 1/24th nullifies kitniyot with kitniyot, less than 1/24th nullifies vegetable seeds with vegetable seeds. At first I thought this was an idea limiting the intent of the Torah's rule of kilayim, that the only thing that counts as kilayim is grain with grain, but the following bit makes it clear I was misreading. Actually what it means is that different kinds of plant have different amounts of spread and require different amounts of seed to fill a field, so you can only use the 1/24th rule if your zeraim are the same kind of seed and otherwise you need a scaling factor.

The Rabbis define a unit of land area called the beis se'ah, which is circularly defined as the amount of area in which you would plant a se'ah of wheat. But if you had a se'ah of vegetable seeds, you would plant a much larger area with it because vegetable seeds produce proportionally larger plants per seed volume. So you can batel a much smaller amount of vegetable seeds in a se'ah of wheat seeds because otherwise the vegetable seeds would overwhelm your beis se'ah. And on the other hand, R' Shimon teaches that flax seeds produce proportionally smaller plants compared to their seed volume, so you can batel a larger amount of flaxseeds in your se'ah of wheat.

Kilayim 2:3

If you plant wheat seeds and then decide that you screwed up and you would rather plant some different seed in the field, you have to wait for the seeds to root before you turn up the soil and get rid of them, because otherwise there might still be wheat seeds that would grow and make the field kilayim.

You might say "Oh, I have to plow the field to uproot these rooted wheat seeds, and then I have to plow the field after I have seeded it with, say, barley, to distribute the barley in the soil and aerate it, so how about I kill two birds with one stone and just spread the barley and then do the ploughing? It will uproot the wheat and aerate the soil for the barley." This is forbidden, presumably because one might forget to go back and make sure the wheat is all gone or something like this.

The Tanna Kamma holds that the uprooting is sort of pro-forma, it's a demonstration that you don't intend to grow wheat anymore, so you just go through the whole field with your plow and it's okay if you miss some spots. Abba Shaul teaches you have to go through and thoroughly plow to uproot all the wheat.

Kilayim 2:4

If you plant wheat and it's rooted and grown, and then you want to switch over to make your field a vineyard, you similarly can't plant the seeds and then uproot. And if you have a vineyard and you want to turn it into a wheat field, you similarly can't plant the seeds and then uproot. But there is a leniency that you can just chop down the above ground vines until they are at shoe level and then uproot. I guess if you do that, the grapevine won't grow back, so you know you're good?

Kilayim 2:5

If you've got a field with a plant that takes years to germinate, like karbas or luf, you have to actually wait out the years with a fallow field before switching it.

If you have a field of wheat and various known weeds, like something it calls isatis, grow in the field, there's no problem of kilayim because it's a weed, not something the farmer planted themself, and there's no problem of mar'is ayin because anyone will look at it and think "Poor Farmer Jim, he has a weed problem," rather than "Sinner Farmer Jim planted kilayim." But if the farmer goes through and partially weeds the field, but leaves some of the apparent weeds, people will start to think that they wanted the kilayim, and apparently the Rabbis think that in addition to the prohibition of planting kilayim, there is a prohibition of maintaining a field of kilayim.

Kilayim 2:6

If you plant two strips of land with two different crops, you need to maintain a gap between them sufficient that people won't think you planted them together. It's a funny disagreement between Beis Hillel and Beis Shammi- Beis Shammai says it's two furrows wide, Beis Hillel says it's one yolk wide, the Tanna Kamma says look, those are basically the same thing.

Kilayim 2:7

If you plant two fields of grain, one wheat and one barley, and they're oriented so that they touch in one place but mostly are separated, because they're oriented differently, that's sufficient separation.

If you plant a field of wheat and your neighbor has a field of barley, they can literally touch each other at your land boundary because the Torah prohibits an individual from planting kilayim, there's no communal ban on kilayim. And the Mishna goes one step further. If you have a field of wheat and your neighbor has a field of barley, and your neighbor's field goes up to their land boundary and you have a gap between your field and the land boundary, you're permitted to plant barley to fill the gap, because it won't look like kilayim.

This is one of those halachos where if I'm the Rabbi and someone asked me if they could do this, I'd say, technically yes, but I forbid it because this might be fine from a kilayim perspective but it's going to lead to disputes over land boundaries.

You can't plant a third plant in the gap, because it would look like kilayim, but you can plant flax in the gap because as discussed earlier flax grows small and so you would never fill a small gap with flax if you're growing a field, so clearly the understanding would be that you're just planting flax to test the field, and are planning to uproot it once it takes.

Kilayim 2:8

On the other hand, you cannot plant hardel or haria in a gap like this- Artscroll translates as mustard or saffron, I thought saffron famously could only be grown in Iran, but apparently it just grows optimally in Iran but can be grown elsewhere in Mediterranean climates. The reason is that these are crops that are grown in small fields, so the understanding would be that you do intend to cultivate these crops as crops. But you can grow hardel or haria in the gap between your field and your neighbors field if both are vegetable fields rather than grain fields, apparently because hardel and haria somehow interfere with the growth of vegetables so the understanding would be that this is a test growth and you're planning to uproot it once it takes.

Kilayim 2:9

We've been talking about gaps that were sort of rectangular in shape. If you split up your field into squares, so that your beis se'ah field is divided into 24 beis rova sections, you can plant 24 different crops in each square, apparently without any gap, because the square shapes will make it clear that they're all separately planted crops. But if you have empty sections, you need to maintain gaps. Rabbi Meir says only two squares can be a separate crop, the Chachamim say if you have empty squares, you can only plant 9/24 squares, arranged in a checkerboard pattern so they only contact each other on diagonals and are otherwise separated by a square length in each direction. R' Eliezer ben Yaakov says you can't mix up squares in a beis se'ah in any way.

Kilaym 2:10

According to the Chachamim's position that you can plant 9/24 squares, any seeds in that square make it count as a planted square, even if part of the square is taken up with a rock or a grave or a fallow area required by a certain crop.

Kilayim 2:11

If you have maintained the proper separation between two species, but they grow so that one covers the other, it's still okay as long as it's not the greek gourd, because the egyptian gourd has vines that entangle themselves too much with the other plant. R' Meir says he was taught by his teachers that the cucumber and egyptian bean also entangle too much, but he would otherwise lean toward the Tanna Kamma's position.