Book Review: Finding & Buying Your Place in the Country

Ok, here we go. I'm reviewing a book I haven't finished reading.

Finding & Buying Your Place in the Country, by Les and Carol Scher, covers some of the same ground as How To Find Your Ideal Country Home by Gene GeRue. But where Gene tells you what to look for, Les and Carol are your angels telling you what to look OUT for.

There are forms, checklists, anecdotes, maps, diagrams, charts. There are addresses, websites, and email addresses. They tell you where the rainfall is, where the good soil is, and where the toxic waste dump is. And they tell you how to get detailed information about the land YOU want.

They give you advice on how to proceed without involving lawyers, and tell you when you absolutely MUST have one. They give you sample contracts, deeds, and checklists. They abound in good, sensible advice on how to find property, evaluate it, and negotiate the price. They inform you about water and easement rights, zoning issues, and eminent domain. There's even a chapter on specifically-Canadian issues.

The book is so packed with information that you have to take it at a slow crawl. I checked it out from the library, renewed it once, and had to return it unfinished because someone else had placed a hold on it. So, whoever you are, good luck! I hope you find your place in the country!

Finding & Buying Your Place in the Country, by Les and Carol Scher, is available new and used. You can even read some of it on Google Books.

If you are seriously looking back-to-the-land, buy both Finding & Buying Your Place in the Country and How To Find Your Ideal Country Home.

Book Review: How To Find Your Ideal Country Home

In How To Find Your Ideal Country Home, Gene GeRue takes you step-by-step through the process of identifying your ideal location. As a one-time real estate agent, he focuses on "Location, location, location!" as the three most important aspects of your place in the country.

In the discussion of terrain, climate, water rights, mineral rights, culture and culture shock, access, taxes, pollution, and more, Gene shows how to narrow your search to the specific regions most likely to meet your goals. Then he piles on the advice:

• Don't fall in love until AFTER the sale;
  
• The real estate agent isn't working for YOU;
• Practice the 10/1 Rule: Visit ten properties, rank them by your preference, then buy the first one you find that is BETTER than your highest rank;
• Know who has the mineral, water and timber rights;
• Buying next to Federal land guarantees NOTHING.

This book, carefully read and religiously applied, will help you zero in on your ideal country home. All you have to do is be HONEST with yourself: what are you looking for? What do you want?

The copy I read came via interlibrary loan; used copies are available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Google Shopping, and probably every used book store on the web.

Book Review: Ten Acres Enough

When I think of homesteading, I think of self-reliance and independence. My dream is to do it all myself, unrealistic as that may be. I'm NOT thinking about truck farming, on any scale.

Your dreams may differ. Certainly Edmund Morris' did! In about 1853, at the age of 49, he sold his business in the city, and moved with wife and six (!) children to a New Jersey farm of 11 acres. There he successfully built a profitable enterprise, selling fruit and vegetables to suppliers in New York City and Philadelphia. He even managed to turn a small profit in his FIRST year, which he admits was due more to a stroke of luck than anything else.

Although the dollar values are all clearly outdated (I was multiplying everything by 100 in my head throughout the book), his methods seem reasonably sound.

• He knew his market, and grew for sale what the market demanded.
  
• He provided quality product, not quantity.
  
• He practiced preventative maintenance.
• He lived frugally and economically, for which he completely credits his wife's management.
  
• He bought the best tools he could afford, and cared for them properly.
• He constantly worked to replenish the land, with compost, manure, lime and ash.
• He stuck with what worked, but also experimented with new things.
• He didn't pay any attention to what the neighbors thought, but was also happy to learn from their successes.
  

One passage I found interesting was his account of a German farmer who had started from nothing to build a successful farm (Chapter 19). Morris relates how this farmer had collected the contents of the family "water closet" to use in manuring the fields, which reminded me of "The Humanure Handbook" by Joseph Jenkins, available in print or online at josephjenkins.com

By 1857, Morris was well-established, and was economically unworried when the Civil War ("the late slaveholders' rebellion") broke out.

There are lots of lessons to be found in this book. Maybe I need to expand my dream.

"Ten Acres Enough", Edmund Morris, 1864, is in print and available through Amazon and other bookstores, or online at dozens of locations. I saw it first at http://www.soilandhealth.org/, but also at http://www.archive.org/details/tenacresenoughpr00morrrich, where you can download a complete PDF from the 1905 printing.

Book Review: Flight from the City

At the beginning of the Roaring 20's, Ralph Borsodi and his family were forced to move out of their rented house in New York City. But instead of searching endlessly in the middle of a housing shortage for worse accommodations at higher prices, they packed up and moved out to seven acres of land an hour and an half away from the city.

Here they set up to become as nearly self-sufficient as possible. Mr. Borsodi developed and promulgated through his books the theory of "production for use", advocating that products should be manufactured and consumed locally, preferably at the homestead level, and not "produced for profit".

Mr. Borsodi is one of the pioneers of the "back-to-the-land" movement. His works predate those of Helen and Scott Nearing by at least a decade, and his ideas are found, uncredited, on homesteads and in books across the country.

Flight from the City is public domain and available from both archive.org and soilandhealth.org.

New Favorite Website

I have found a new favorite website: soilandhealth.org , an online library of homesteading and agricultural manuals and books. It is run by Steve Solomon in Tasmania, Australia, according to Australian copyright regulations.

The website explains, "By Australian copyright rules we usually cannot copy books for our users that are currently in print (unless they are also old enough to be public domain material)." But many of the books are public domain, even in the United States. Soil And Health led me to three of the books I am currently reading: Ten Acres Enough, Three Acres and Liberty, and Flight from the City. I also found Construction of a Simplified Wood Gas Generator for Fueling Internal Combustion Engines in a Petroleum Emergency, a U.S. FEMA document from 1989 which seems remarkably prescient in 2008.

I have provided links to all these books in my reading list, but they're pointed to three different providers. Check them all out!

Dreams of Homesteading

My earliest inclination to homesteading I inherited from my mother. She had the Reader's Digest "Back to Basics" book, and I would look at it for HOURS. Also on her shelf were the Foxfire books.

But not until my parents retired did she get her place in the country, near her childhood home in Parker's Prairie, MN. And by the time she turned 70, she was wheelchair-bound, and never has really enjoyed her dream.

I don't want that.

I want to get away from cities and asphalt and Code Red air. I want to get away from prostitutes and tourists. I want to get away from contracts and clearances. I want to get away from Congresscritters and bureaucrats.

In short, I live near Washington, DC.

I live in an upstairs piggyback condo with effectively NO attached property. And until recently, I liked it that way. I don't have any lawn to mow, and that was the way I wanted it.

On the other hand, I have the dream of standing on my wrap-around porch and looking out to the horizon, saying smugly, "Yep. That's mine."

All I want is MY 300 square miles! What's wrong with that? ;-)

The problem is, I have lots of things I'm trying to get away FROM--but what am I running TO? I can picture myself PLANNING the perfect homestead, but I never seem to picture myself in a garden. I can say, "Yes, goats would seem to be an ideal small stock for milk or meat," but I never imagine myself actually getting up to do the milking.

Not that I have a problem with getting up early--my alarm goes off at 4:30 AM now.

I plan, I dream, I ponder, but I never DO what it will take. And I'm afraid to find out that I won't enjoy eating from my own garden, won't enjoy the simple, frugal life as much as I think I will.

When I come down to it, I'm lazy. I only want to do a job once, and make it so I never have to do it again. That's one of the requirements for being a good engineer, and I think in many ways I am. But lazy don't get the crops in, and even though I like to go camping, I have to say I hate getting caught in the rain.

I'm not so much attracted to country living as I am despairing of life in the city. Gas has hit $4/gallon. Electricity has nearly doubled in the last 3 years. Federal energy policy is mandating ethanol from corn for biofuel, ignoring the facts that corn is not the best source, that the transfer of corn from feedstock to fermentation vat is driving up the price of meat and milk, and the transfer of land from raising other crops to raising corn is creating a corporate farming monoculture and driving up the cost of other foods, like bread and vegetables.

And then there's NAIS, and Monsanto, and GM crops, and petroleum fertilizers, and pesticides, and cancer, and, and, and...

I'm not predicting the imminent end of the world. I'm just convinced that being able to do for myself is good insurance--Simple Prudence, to coin a phrase--against almost anything but Doomsday.

But I'm still running FROM, not TO.

And then my "reason" kicks in. "You can't go off and become a subsistence farmer in Rural America! Your daughter is starting college in 440 DAYS, and your sons are following in 4 and 8 years! You can't just Tune Out, Turn Off, and Drop In--you've got bills! You've got responsibilities! YOU'VE GOT A JOB!"

I wish I could shut me up. But I make some good points--I have a responsibility to my kids, and I need to fulfill it.

TALK, TALK, TALK. I'm shutting up now. I'm too depressing.