John Heinerman reports that above anything else the Sumerians were great agriculturists. It was they who gave us the world's first "Farmer's Almanac" before anyone else did. An American archaeological expedition digging in Iraq in 1949-50, found a three by four inch clay tablet covered with cuneiform inscriptions. After the artifact was baked, cleaned, and mended in a university museum laboratory in Philadelphia, practically its entire text became legible enough to be read and deciphered. Samuel Noah Kramer states in his History Begins At Sumer that the restored document, 108 lines in length, consists of a series of instructions addressed by a farmer to his son for the purpose of guiding him throughout his yearly agricultural activities, beginning with the inundation of the fields in May-June and ending with the cleaning and winnowing of the freshly harvested crops in the following April-May.
Other inscribed clay tablets of the same period (about 3,500 years ago) speak of planting vegetable gardens and how they should be arranged and laid out. Natural insect and weed control measures ware given, too. Kramer also noted that "one of the more significant horticultural techniques practiced in Sumer from the earliest days was shade-tree gardening-that is, the planting of broad shade trees to protect the garden plants from sun and wind. [John Heinerman, Hidden Treasures of Ancient American Cultures, pp. 107-108]