Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

Read this a while back. Some real gems.

When Morris wrote this book, 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
http://www.zanthan.com/gardens/gardenlog/?cat=7
January 14th, 2007

In the sixties Edmund Morris wrote a slim book about how he gave up city life 
i. 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”.