WHERE TO FIND OUT HOW 57 



whose actual experience has just begun: the neo- 

 phyte is apt to be carried away by the revelation 

 of how. much nature ought -to and, on paper, can 

 do for him. The panic of 1907 brought forth 

 Bolton Hall and his Three Acres and Liberty and 

 A Little Land and a Living. Their theses, presum- 

 ably predicated on an experience in the manage- 

 ment of the vacant-lot-gardens movement that 

 flourished in our large industrial centers at the time, 

 is that if three hundred and fifty-two square feet 

 of ground will produce ninety-six dollars' worth of 

 celery, an acre should yield twelve thousand dol- 

 lars' worth. To give Mr. Hall his due, he concedes 

 the difficulty of planting and cultivating an acre 

 so closely and intensively. It can be done he does 

 not say this only with slave or peon labor. I was 

 fortunately spared the pitfall of this specious rea- 

 soning by the knowledge of a horrible example- 

 right in my own family. At different times both my 

 grandfathers tackled fruit farming. The one made 

 a famous success; the other, starting from the prem- 

 ise that "if you had ten thousand trees and got 

 only a dollar a tree it would be ten thousand dol- 

 lars" made as thorough if not so conspicuous a 

 failure. 



Like 1907, the panic that started in 1929 pro- 

 duced its crop of back-to-the-farm books. Ralph 

 Borsodi's Flight from the City is the type speci- 

 men. Unless I am mistaken, Mr. Borsodi is the 



