Growing up on a Delaware farm was a wonderful and rewarding experience for me.

I grew up in an area where a couple of dozen families in an area of about hundred square miles had farmed, married each other and been a stable community for centuries, along Delaware Rout One just north of Lewes.

In my early youth, I grew up on a farm where we had 33 cows, 18 we milked twice a day, 3 horses, some chickens, 60 acres of corn, hay and pasture. It was a farm that my maternal grandparents owned. There were barns, tractors, long hours and Sundays in church. We grew corn, hay and pasture. We had a large garden and some fruit trees. We hunted, foraged, and grew what we ate and used in most cases. We ate duck, goose, pigeon, muskrat, fish, crabs, shell fish, groundhog, mustard greens, collards, wild garlic, onion, persimmons, wild cherry, wild strawberries, blueberries, figs, mint, wild carrots, herbs and wild spices.

We had plenty of beef, chicken, milk, cream and our own homemade butter, as well as at least two kinds of handmade soap. We cooked on a woodstove which also heated the house. I slept under quilts and on feather beds that were over a hundred years old. We had a little coal furnace but coal was expensive and that was only for the coldest times. We had electric and a phone too. We shucked and shelled corn, some of which we traded to neighbors for pork, veal or turkey.

I lived on my grandparent