Connecting with Nature on a Minifarm

The yard surrounding Karen Harwell’s home is only six hundred square feet, yet it harbors ducks, a beehive, eighteen semi-dwarf fruit trees, an organic vegetable garden, calming places to sit and read and think, and neighborhood teenagers. The teens visit summer, the dog, and sit in the rabbit hutch, hold the baby rabbits, and conduct that archaic form of social networking: talk.

“I wake up in the morning and I throw on my vest over my nightgown and then summer and I head out the front door and we just walk around the garden noticing things. It’s just a wonderful way to start the day,” Harwell said, as she escorted me around her minifarm.
— Richard Louv, American author and Audubon Medal Winner, The Nature Principle, The Nature Principle at Home