8 WE FARM FOR A HOBBY 



I had always lived in the country. I was born 

 in Germantown and brought up in Chestnut Hill 

 when those two suburbs of Philadelphia were dis- 

 tinctly rural. I was used to a way of life that pre- 

 supposed a vegetable garden, a flock of chickens, 

 a cow or two, and a closetful of canned goods and 

 preserves down cellar. Nevertheless I still sub- 

 scribed in a vague, lukewarm way to the theory that 

 it is cheaper to buy milk than to keep a cow, al- 

 though my business experience had long since 

 convinced me that in industry the theory never 

 works out in practice. It now presented itself for 

 practical demonstration on the homestead. 



Earlier in 1932 I had interested myself in the 

 problem of how a relief subject fared on a food 

 order of five dollars a week. I had some experience 

 both with army rationing and provisioning myself 

 for canoe trips three or more hundred miles be- 

 yond the end of steel into the sub-arctic. It seemed 

 to me one should eat perhaps not well but suffi- 

 ciently on five dollars a week. Yet when I kept 

 book on our own expenditure for food for several 

 weeks that year I found that even with the help 

 of a summer vegetable garden, and of relatively 

 low store prices for food, our weekly bills averaged 

 seventeen dollars, a good deal for four people who 

 lived as simply as we did. Could we, perhaps, by 

 producing the greatest possible amount of our own 



