Hope this finds you well! It’s been about 21 years since I last wrote (Summer 1987). Our family has grown and grown up! We have two sons, Seth, 24 and Sam, 18. Seth graduated from college and decided to move home. He has his own tree business and helps on the family farm.

The old husband and wife partnership has worked a lifetime on this farm, caring for their four acres of orchard, the 4 two-acre fields of legume pasture and hay, and these two acres of poultry operation. They hold title to 20 acres that feels to them as a very large outdoor garden, house, and sanctuary. In the beginning, (their beginning), they cared, with thoughtful vigor, for five bee hives as they also cared for all of the intertwined parts and elements of their farming. While it has become more unpredictable, difficult and demanding they maintain hives still, they farm still.

It was in consequence of reading a little volume called “Ten Acres Enough” — a practical and statistical, as well as, in certain points, a poetical production — that I came to prepare this volume. In that work a charming and interesting account is given of the successful attempt of a Philadelphia mechanic to redeem a strip of exhausted land of ten acres in extent. So useful is the instruction it contains, that no one should think of buying a farm, experimenting in rural life, or even reading this book, without first perusing that one. To be sure, the author forgets occasionally some minor matters — such as clothing, food, and the like, leaving his family naked and unfed for several years — but that is doubtless due to his poetical temperament and intense love of nature.

We can see how the developments in mass production of food and its accompanying decline in the quality of the food, create in turn the demand for “morsel-production”: the limited production of high quality food. Morsel: tasteful food, be it lettuce, bacon or shiitake mushrooms, incorporating in taste and texture the unique qualities of the soil on which it is produced and the singular way in which the farmer has accompanied its development. Morsel production: yielding those unique products, sold by a farmer who is like no one else, to a group of people who know that these products will feed their bodies in a delightful way.