Homestead Year: Back to the Land in Suburbia

Judith Moffett wanted to be a full-time subsistence farmer: a homesteader. She settled instead for just one year of living close to the land, temporarily forsaking her academic and writing careers to devote herself, with her husband's help, to a one-acre plot in a suburb outside Philadelphia. And from the year's hard work of potato planting, duck and fish farming, honey extraction, blueberry picking, and spaghetti sauce production, grew an awareness that more was involved here than putting food on the table; her project was a living lesson in the complex ways in which everything in nature is interconnected.