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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Ten Acres Enough
  • Date: Sat, 14 Jun 2008 18:13:09 -0600


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”.






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