Rosh Hashanah 12 - The laws of vegetables

We started this tractate saying that there are four beginnings of the year, and what each one appertains to. There is a new year (Rosh Hashanah) for vegetables, and it falls on the first of the month of Tishrei. What are the laws for vegetables? They relate to tithes.

In general, one has to give tithes of the grain that he collects in the land of Israel. The Sages extended this law to vegetables and obligated one to set aside tithes of vegetables before eating them. The obligation of tithes is year by year. Thus, if one picks a vegetable on the last day before Rosh Hashanah and then another after the sun goes down and it is already a new year, he must give the titles separately. He cannot give a tithe from the vegetables of one year for the next, nor the following year's tithe from this one.

(Incidentally, he cannot pick vegetables on the Rosh Hashanah day itself, so we assume that we are talking about a non-Jew he did it for him, and even that - on his own accord.)

Some more laws of the vegetables. The obligation to give tithes starts at the moment when one harvests it from the ground. However, one can still snack from them. Later, when one bundles the produce for the market to sell, one can no longer snack from it until he separates tithes. That is for the vegetables that are sold by bundles. If the vegetables are sold in baskets, the cutoff point for snacks is putting them in a basket.

Art: Vegetable Seller by Joachim Beuckelaer