“Recently we have seen a great back-to-the-land movement, with many young professional people returning to small scale farming; thus it is great fun to read about someone who did exactly the same thing in 1864. In that year, Mr. Edmund Morris gave up his business and city life for a farm of ten acres, made a go of mixed farming and then wrote a book about it. Mr. Morris proves Abraham Lincoln's prediction: ‘The greatest fine art of the future will be the making of a comfortable living from a small piece of land.’ Kudos to A Distant Mirror for resurrecting this fascinating treasure.” - Sally Fallon Morell, President, The Weston A. Price FoundationThis book may be about farming and homesteading, and indeed it is a delightfully readable autobiography of a farmer in the America of the 1860s, but it also about much, much more. The challenges that faced the author are timeless, as are his courage, commitment, and ingenuity. There are insights for anyone, farmer or not, in this book.
“As you would have your children intelligent, virtuous, and happy, and their memory, in later life, of early home a pleasant one, so make your farm and your children’s home your business of life, then adorn that business throughout. If you would inspire your own children and your neighbors with the nobleness of your business, then draw about you such an array of beauty as no one but the cultivator of the soil can collect.
Let every foot of your farm show the touch of refinement. While you are arranging your fields for convenient and successful cropping, let it be done with order and neatness. While building the fence, let it be beautiful as well as substantial. While arranging your vegetable gardens and orchards do not overlook geometrical regularity.
Do not, on any account, omit the planting of flowers and the various kinds of fruit trees.”
CONTENTS
- City experiences ~ moderate expectations
- Practical views ~ safety of investments in land
- Resolved to go ~ escape from business ~ choosing a location
- Buying A farm ~ a long search ~ anxiety to sell ~ rorced to quit
- Making a purchase ~ first impressions
- Planting a peach orchard ~ how to preserve peach trees
- Planting raspberries and strawberries ~ tricks of the nursery
- Blackberries ~ a remarkable Coincidence
- The garden ~ female management ~ comforts and profits
- Cheated in a cow ~ a good and a bad one ~ the saint of the barnyard
- A cloud of weeds ~ great sales of plants
- Pigs and poultry ~ luck and ill luck
- City and country life contrasted
- Two acres in truck ~ revolution in agriculture
- Birds and the services they render
- Close of my first Year ~ its loss and gain
- My second year ~ trenching the garden ~ strawberry profits
- raspberries ~ The Lawtons
- Liquid manures ~ an illustration
- My third year ~ liquid manure ~ three years’ results
- A barnyard manufactory ~ land Enough ~ faith in manure
- Profits of fruit-growing ~ the trade in berries
- Gentleman farming ~ establishing a Home
- Unsuccessful men ~ rebellion not ruinous to northern agriculture
- Where to locate - East or West
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