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  • From: "TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org, OWL-OldWaysLiving@yahoogroups.com
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Ten Acres Enough
  • Date: Sat, 10 Feb 2007 08:31:21 -0700


You never know what'll turn up in a thrift store.

"The year was 1864--almost a hundred years before Helen and Scott Nearing's
Living the Good Life, The Mother Earth News, and the Whole Earth Catalogs."

Ten Acres Enough: The Small Farm Dream is Possible

This book is a 1982 reprint of the book published in 1864 during the Civil
War but it also contains a large section of commentary written by Lynn
Miller, head of Small Farmers' Journal, titled The Small Farm Dream Is
Possible.

Bookfinder.com lists copies from $28 to $158
http://www.bookfinder.com/search/?ac=sl&st=sl&qi=4vcABdyJaaQlxRsuY7ZQas31fd0
_0018605915_2:2:3

Barb spotted this jewel in the local thrift store/food pantry. It was ten
cents.

Here's one blog about the book.

paul tradingpost@lobo.net
------------------------------------------

Ten Acres Enough
http://www.zanthan.com/gardens/gardenlog/
review by M Sinclair Stevens January 14, 2007

In the sixties (1860's) Edmund Morris wrote a slim book about how he gave
up city life in his native Philadelphia and moved, with his wife and six
kids, back to the land. He used half his life savings to purchase a small
farm in New Jersey outright. Although he had no previous farming
experience, he had spent years beforehand reading everything he could about
farming, talking to farmers at the market, and visiting farms. Within three
years he had made more money than he'd manage to save in his previous
twenty. He owed no rent and his family ate well off what the farm produced.
He believed so firmly that he had found a practical path to comfort and
security that he wrote Ten Acres Enough to explain how he did it and
encourage others to follow his example. The year was 1864--almost a hundred
years before Helen and Scott Nearing's Living the Good Life, The Mother
Earth News, and the Whole Earth Catalogs.

Edmund Morris had studied the economics of the westward movement. Out west
land was cheaper but corn and wheat brought low prices at the market and
there was the trouble of freighting them there. He decided it made more
business sense to grow berries and soft fruits to sell to the Philadelphia
and New York markets.

I'm fascinated with the details of this book in the same way I'm delighted
with the descriptions of daily life in Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House
books which describe a much more primitive life two decades later. Edmund
Morris kept very exact accounts and shares them with us.

He planted 804 peach trees, six acres of strawberries, two acres of
raspberries, one acre in tomatoes, one in clover, and the remaining in
miscellaneous vegetables such as cabbages and pumpkins. His wife and eldest
daughter were in charge of a large vegetable garden. Whenever they went to
town to shop, they took their surplus to the town general store to sell on
consignment. At the end of the year when they settled up their grocery
account, they were surprised to discover that the merchant owed them money.

Edmund Morris was an advocate of what we call the "French intensive" method
of gardening. He believed in digging deep and adding a lot of organic
material. He collected leaves from all over the neighborhood and built huge
composting trenches. And he believed, more than anything, in the power of
manure. His biggest expense ($248) for manure. When you consider that his
11 acres and the house cost $1000 and that he paid his live-in help an
annual salary of $144...it's mind-boggling. Eventually he embarked in a
system of manure production in which he bought spring calves which he
raised to maturity and then sold, not for the profit on the cows (which was
about $2) but for the manure they produced (saving him $248). He developed
a system of watering his crops with manure tea by putting a large watering
tank on wheels.

Morris was ahead of his time in his views on birds and dedicates an entire
chapter to explain how beneficial they are to farmers and gardeners, who
considered them pests and thieves. When he discovers "three great,
overgrown boobies, with guns in their hands, trampling down my
strawberries, and shooting bluebirds and robins," he evicts them. "I
suggested to them that I thought their own township was quite large enough
to keep its own loafers, without sending them to depredate on me, warned
them never to show themselves on my premises again, and then drove them
out." Another time a neighboring farmer was killing some birds in his wheat
field. To prove that the birds did more good than harm, they "opened up its
crop, and found in it two hundred weevils, and but four grains of wheat,
and in these four grains the weevil had burrowed!"

He embraced innovation and science. While still living in Philadephia he
had invested almost $1 a piece for six root cuttings of a newly discovered
and improved blackberry (discovered in 1834 by Lewis Secor but made famous
by William Lawton)--known as the Lawton or New Rochelle blackberry. He felt
cheated when the plants came in a letter, "mere fibres of a greater
root--certainly not thicker than a thill quill, not one of them having a
top. They looked like long white worms, with here and there a bud or eye."
Two summers later "they bore a crop of fruit which astonished me. From the
group of bushes I picked fifteen quarts of berries superior to any thing of
the kind we had ever eaten." When he moved to the farm, he brought 200
blackberry plants with him. His neighbors laughed at him for planting
blackberries that grew in every hedgerow and which they struggled to dig
out. However, when he sold the superior fruit at market at high prices,
they clamored for plants. He ended up selling $460 worth of blueberry
plants which is what put him in the black his first year on the farm.

He faced problems with his tomato crop because early and late tomatoes
fetched a high price at the market but in mid-season the market was
glutted. Morris describes as hopeful the new technique for tinning tomatoes
so that they can be preserved for winter use and save the waste of letting
them rot in the fields when the effort to ship them to market is not worth
the gain. He marvels at the dexterity of the tinmen who can solder lids on
cans at the rate of almost 100 an hour.

Another problem was the expense of the cartons and cases required to ship
his produce by train to the cities. A certain portion were not returned. He
longs for some disposable form of packaging which would reduce his cost and
perhaps encourage people who do not want to mess with returns to buy
produce. Well, we all know where that led us.

I enjoyed this book so much that after checking it out from the library, I
bought it for myself. The writing is a bit old-fashioned. And, especially
in the last two chapters, it has the distinct tone of a proselytising
self-help book. That was it's aim, to encourage other people to go
back-to-the-land. He includes plenty of details of his methods and lots of
facts and figures. I'm stunned at the enormity of his labors but he seems
to think life in the country is much easier than the stress of living in
the city and "working for the landlord".









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