Homesteading 101

Lesson 1

Morris leaves the city: the dream of a few acres

Edmund Morris spent his life up to the age of forty in his native city of Philadelphia. He began, in his own words, without a dollar, saved a few hundred dollars by close application to business, married, and went into trade the same year. The business kept him, but it also kept him short of ready cash, because his gains went straight back into tools, fixtures, and machinery. Then came the crisis of 1837, which nearly ruined him, and five hard years of struggle before trade revived in 1842. He describes lying down at night not to peaceful sleep but to dream up fresh ways to preserve his credit for tomorrow.

Two numbers explain why the country called to him. In the city he paid three hundred dollars a year in rent for a dwelling house, money that bought shelter and nothing else, year after year, with no ownership at the end of it. He also noticed something hopeful: farmers around him rarely became insolvent, and when one did, the cause was usually starting in debt, speculating outside his calling, or neglecting the business itself, not bad crops. Land, carefully worked, looked safer than the credit system that had tormented him.

His dream was deliberately modest, and that modesty is the first lesson. His book carries the promise on its title page: how a very small farm may be made to keep a very large family. He did not want an estate, a show farm, or hundreds of acres he could not tend. He studied the small cultivators near Philadelphia who farmed five to ten acres thoroughly, noted their failures as watchfully as their successes, and visited the truck farmers and fruit growers who supplied the city market, asking questions and treasuring up what he saw. By the time he moved, he had a plan built on other people's tested experience, not on romance.

Honest note: Morris wrote as a man of his time, and his escape depended on having some savings, a large and willing family to help, and a booming city market nearby. The dream transfers to today; the exact starting conditions may not, so plan for the help and the buyers you actually have.

Lesson 2

Choosing land and reading soil

When Morris finally bought, the place he chose tells you his whole checklist. The grounds comprised eleven acres, within a few miles of Philadelphia, within gunshot of a railroad station, and on the outskirts of a town with churches, schools, and stores. Notice the order of his priorities: the land came with a house large enough for his family, a barn for a horse and cow, a shed, and, tellingly, a good pile of manure in the barnyard that went with the purchase. For a fruit grower, stored fertility was part of the value of the place.

He read the soil through what was already growing on and around it. The neighboring ground carried a luxuriant growth of strawberries, rows of stalwart raspberries, and a fine peach orchard impatient to blossom. His reasoning was plain: the eleven acres could be no worse land than this. Weeds covered his own fields, and he had a horror of weeds, but he refused to be frightened by them, because weeds signal neglected fertility as much as poor soil. A weedy field near a city, with good soil underneath, was a bargain waiting for labor.

The price shows the same clear eye. The place had been taken by a city merchant to secure a debt of eleven hundred dollars, and both the former owner and the merchant needed to sell. Morris understood that land value is partly timing: there are always more sellers than buyers, and a patient buyer with cash finds anxious sellers. He also weighed the west against the east later in the book and chose nearness to market over cheap distant acres, because berries spoil and freight eats profit.

Copy his method today. Walk the land after rain and in a dry spell. Dig a spadeful in several spots and look for dark topsoil, earthworms, and drainage. Check what thrives on neighboring plots, ask about the water supply and the frost pattern, and measure the drive to your buyers honestly. Cheap land far from any market is often the most expensive land of all.

Lesson 3

Planning a small farm on paper

Morris laid out his eleven acres like a budget, each acre with a job. One acre was in clover. Another held the dwelling house, garden, stable, and barnyard, with much of it still given to garden purposes. That left nine acres for general fruit and vegetable culture. Before a tree went in, he had already decided where his fertility, his food, his animals, and his cash crops would live, and nothing was left to drift.

His planting plan stacked crops in both space and time. He spent two hundred dollars on old, well rotted stable manure from the city, spread it over the ten acres, and ploughed nine of them, subsoiling behind the plough to loosen the ground ten inches deep and more. On six acres he set out his peach trees in rows eighteen feet apart, eighteen feet apart in the rows, which holds one hundred and thirty four trees to the acre, eight hundred and four trees in all. The peaches would take three years to bear well, so the wide spaces between the rows were not wasted: they became strawberry ground at once.

That layering is the heart of small farm planning. A slow crop gives structure and future income. A fast crop fills the gaps and pays this year. A clover acre rests and feeds the soil. The garden acre feeds the family daily. Write your own plan the same way, on paper, with a calendar: what goes in each bed and row, what it costs, when it should pay, and what follows it when it is done.

Honest note: Morris could buy city stable manure by the load and hire ploughing with a team for cash prices that no longer exist. Today the same line in the plan reads compost, cover crops, and mulch, bought or made with whatever your town offers. The principle, fertility planned before planting, has not dated at all.

Lesson 4

Fruits and berries that pay

Morris bet the farm, literally, on the smaller fruits, and his numbers show why. Between his peach rows he divided the eighteen foot spaces into five rows of strawberries, about three feet between rows, plants one foot apart in the row, roughly ten thousand plants per acre. He bought sixty thousand plants at two dollars per thousand, one hundred and twenty dollars in all, below the market price because the nurseryman had a surplus. He and three of his children set them out in a week of the most tiresome work they had ever done, and at noon they went home, in his telling, with raging appetites to a plain, well cooked dinner.

He was ruthless about establishment. Writers on strawberry culture advised removing the blossoms the first year, and Morris laid it down as absolutely indispensable: every blossom was clipped off with scissors, so the plants built crowns and roots instead of a handful of early berries. There was no fruit to sell that first season from the strawberries, and he accepted the loss as the price of a robust bed. Raspberries came next, the ordinary Red Antwerp, roots at six dollars per thousand, thirty four dollars for the lot, planted by his own hands in three days in deeply ploughed ground, where they grew finely.

The payoff story he tells best is the blackberries. His Lawton blackberries cropped five hundred and ninety two quarts and netted him one hundred and fifty nine dollars and eighty four cents, an average of twenty seven cents a quart, while common wild blackberries in the same market brought ten cents. His moral is blunt: it cost no more to raise the Lawtons than the common article, so raise the best fruit and sell it at the highest price instead of the poorest fruit at the lowest. Quality, on a small farm, is not vanity. It is the whole margin.

Peaches completed the ladder: eight hundred and four trees at seven cents each, fifty six dollars and twenty eight cents, plus sixteen dollars and eight cents for planting. A crop that pays in year one, berries, a crop that pays in year two, more berries, and an orchard maturing behind them. Sequence your own plantings so something is always coming into bearing.

Lesson 5

Vegetables, compost, and labor

The garden acre fed the family and sold the surplus, and Morris ran it on a simple rule: occupy every inch of ground with something. Where a tree or vine left a gap, a cabbage plant went in. Pumpkin hills filled suitable corners. Cabbage and tomato plants cost him thirty dollars one season, and his green corn went in at intervals of about two weeks, so the family had a succession of tender corn all summer instead of one glut and then none. Succession sowing, the gardeners' oldest trick, is all through his practice.

Under everything lay his faith in manure, the subject of whole chapters. He built what he called a barnyard manufactory: pigs and poultry worked over the yard, leaves were raked in by the astonishing quantity, and neighborhood boys gathered bones from pig pens and slaughterhouses at ten cents a bushel, laid aside to be ground for the soil. He experimented with liquid manures, trenching the garden, and composting everything the place produced. Nothing organic left the farm if he could help it. Fertility was manufactured at home, continuously, the way a factory makes goods.

Labor was the other input he refused to romanticize. His first year brought a cloud of weeds, and he answers it with tools as much as sweat: a horse drawn cultivator that did the work of six men with the hoe, cost six dollars, and saved him, by his reckoning, the difference between its price and a hundred dollars of hoeing. With that help the family worked clear into November and cleaned the whole ground so thoroughly that the neighbors who had jeered came to admire it. Choose the tool that multiplies your hours before you add hours.

Honest note: some of Morris's manuring practices, like fresh liquid manure on food crops close to harvest, do not meet modern food safety practice. Compost manure hot and finished, keep fresh manure off crops you eat raw, and follow current waiting periods. His principle, feed the soil first and waste nothing, is exactly right; his 1864 handling is not the part to copy.

Lesson 6

Selling at market

Morris grew for one customer above all: the Philadelphia market, a short haul from his gate. Everything in his plan bends toward it. Berries were picked into quart boxes, and to send one great crop to market he bought three thousand quart boxes and fifty chests to hold them, at a cost of two hundred dollars. He needed duplicates because a set of boxes might be a week or ten days coming back from his agent, and ripe fruit cannot wait for packaging. Packaging, unglamorous as it sounds, was a planned cost of selling, not an afterthought.

He also watched what the market rewarded. Around him, a canning grower engaged tomatoes at twenty five cents a bushel, at which the cultivator cleared about a hundred dollars an acre, and Morris reports two hundred, and even four hundred dollars an acre frequently cleared on truck crops near the city. His own Lawton blackberries earned their premium because they were large, named, and better than the free wild fruit beside them in the same market. He sold plants, too: in his first year, when clipped strawberry blossoms meant no fruit income, his entire profit came from sales of plants, the one crop a new fruit grower always has, because every beginner must buy what established growers can divide and sell.

His selling rules travel well. Grow what buyers already want and cannot get enough of; his friends confessed they could never afford to eat all the berries they wished for, which ended his fear of a glut. Pick at the right ripeness, pack honestly, keep quality uniform, and show up reliably week after week. A small grower cannot win on volume, so win on trust and on being early, ripe, and clean when others are late, green, and muddy.

Today your market may be a farmers market, a farm stand, a CSA box, or a local grocer instead of a Philadelphia commission agent, and your boxes may be clamshells and crates ordered online. The arithmetic is unchanged: count packaging, transport, fees, and your own hours as real costs before you call a crop profitable.

Lesson 7

Keeping accounts on a homestead

Morris kept accounts the way he kept his rows: straight, dated, and complete, and his book is valuable precisely because he prints them. Look at how he separates kinds of spending. Closing his first year, he reports the actual cost of the year as four hundred and fifty five dollars, and points out that two hundred and twenty six dollars and thirty six cents of his outlay was a permanent investment of capital in standard fruits, trees and plants that would not have to be bought again. His own time and labor he does not charge, he says, because that question is settled by the grand result: did the farm support the family or not?

His peach orchard account shows the same habit in miniature: eight hundred and four trees at seven cents, fifty six dollars and twenty eight cents; planting at two cents a tree, sixteen dollars and eight cents; ploughing and harrowing, twenty dollars; four hundred bushels of ashes, forty eight dollars; manure, two hundred dollars; total, three hundred and forty dollars and thirty six cents. He even confesses he has unfairly charged the whole manure bill to the orchard, since other crops ate from the same ground. That kind of honesty about your own bookkeeping is what makes the next decision a good one.

Steal his categories. Keep one page for capital: land, trees, fences, tools, the things you buy once. Keep one page for the running year: seed, feed, packaging, repairs, hired help. Keep one page for returns, crop by crop, so you know which bed earned its place. Then, once a year, do what Morris did at the close of his first and third years: add it up in public, at least to yourself, losses included, and let the totals argue with your plans.

A small warning from his own story: he did not charge his family's labor, and many homesteads still do not. That is fine for judging whether the farm feeds you, which was his question. But if you compare homestead income with a wage job, count the hours too, or you will fool yourself kindly and completely.

Lesson 8

A one-acre plan for today

Now translate Morris to one modern acre. Keep his proportions, not his prices. Give roughly a tenth of the ground to the house plot, paths, compost, and tool storage. Give the largest share, about half an acre, to your cash and staple beds in rotation: potatoes, sweet corn in successions, beans, squash, tomatoes, and greens, sown in small batches every two weeks like his corn. Give a quarter acre to perennial fruits, the modern version of his berry bet: a row of thornless blackberries, raspberries, a bed of strawberries, and two or three dwarf fruit trees along the sunny edge, blossoms pinched the first year, exactly as he insisted.

Build fertility before you build planting lists. Start three compost bins the month you arrive, plant a cover crop on every empty bed, and mulch paths and rows so the soil is never bare. Morris spent two hundred dollars of 1864 money, a serious share of his capital, on manure before he expected a return; the modern equivalent is spending your first season's effort and a modest budget on compost, soil testing, and mulch rather than on more plants. Get a soil test from your extension service, fix pH and major shortages once, and then maintain with compost and cover crops.

Price the plan honestly in today's money. His three hundred dollars a year of city rent is the comparison that still works: add up what your household now spends on the food this acre can realistically replace, plus any market sales you have actually arranged with real buyers, and set that as the acre's target. His berry premium also still works: one named, excellent crop, sold ripe and well packed, will usually out earn three mediocre ones. Keep his three account pages from the first week, and review them each winter.

Final honesty: Morris wrote in 1864 dollars and 1864 New Jersey conditions, with family labor, cheap manure, and a hungry city at his gate. Your yields, prices, pests, and water will differ, and no book, his or this course, can promise that ten acres, or one, will be enough. What his example does prove is the method: small ground, thoroughly worked, richly fed, planted to high value crops, sold with care, and counted honestly. Start with one acre run that way, and let your own ledger, not anyone's promise, tell you when to grow.

Sources

The Book Behind This Course

This course is taught from classic texts that are free for anyone to read. Every method in the lessons traces back to one of these books.

• Ten Acres Enough, Edmund Morris (1864), Project Gutenberg

Graduation

Your few acres can be enough

You came in with a city weary Philadelphia merchant and you leave with a complete small farm method: choose land by soil and market, plan every acre on paper, feed the soil like a factory, plant berries and fruit that pay for quality, sell them packed and ready, and count everything honestly. Start small, work it thoroughly, and let your own accounts tell the story. Congratulations on finishing Homesteading 101.

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