Hardscrabble Harvest is a charming story in verse about the running battle between a farm family and the mischievous animals that plunder their fields. Crows peck at freshly sown seeds, ducks eat new strawberry plants, rabbits nibble on tender lettuces, and raccoons dine on ears of ripening corn. All summer long the young farmer and his wife are hard-pressed to protect their growing crops.
But autumn comes at last, and the family is ready to celebrate its harvest – bushels of red tomatoes, a cellar full of apples for cider and pumpkins for pie. In rollicking verse and wonderful illustrations, Dahlov Ipcar tells of all the hard work that goes into making a bountiful fall harvest.
Islandport Press has now reissued this tribute to a New England autumn which was originally published in 1976.
Dahlov says she is often asked if the couple depicted in Hardscrabble Harvest is based on people she knows. "My people are not anyone I know," she claims. "But I feel like I know them. I rather like that young couple," she says. She lived firsthand the life of a farmer for many years. As she says, "we farmed, I painted, I worked on my books, and then we went to bed. If you get up at 5 every morning, you get a lot done."
EXCERPT “"The farmer plants
early in the spring.
He'll be lucky
if he harvests a thing!"
”
