This is for my husband. He said he had a reader he loved as a kid. It was published by Scholastic. He said it is about a family who loses everything. The father, mother and at least two kids get in their car and head out. They end up buying a farm which is not fertile because they were taken advantage off. However, the farm is kind of magical and becomes fertile. The farmer who sold it to them comes back at toward the end of the book and wants it back. He says that the father of the family had said he would buy the farm with everything in his wallet and that he did not hold his end of the bargain because there were three moths in his wallet he did not give away. The farmer proceeds to plant trees which grow immediately and turn the day to night because of the shade of their canopies. The family goes hunting for moths with a flashlight and find three moths to pay the bad man with.
This is McBroom’s Wonderful One-Acre Farm, by Sid Fleischman, a wonderful book in the vein of old American tall tales.
THANK YOU so much!
This is the exact book I’ve also been searching for FOREVER – I think my copy was part of an anthology and I hope I can figure out the entire collection based on this. Thank you!!!
It might be McBroom’s Wonderful One-Acre Farm.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/355281.McBroom_s_Wonderful_One_Acre_Farm
A family buys some land for a farm (I don’t remember what they used to buy it), but the guy who sold it to them cheated them. He really sold them a pond, which covers only a single acre, and all the acres he claimed it had are “stacked on top of one another like griddle cakes.” The family doesn’t know what to do, so they decide that they can at least go swimming in the pond because it’s hot. It’s so hot that the pond instantly dries up, leaving them with one acre of the most fertile land in the country, which produces food incredibly big and fast. The guy who sold it to them tries to get it back, but they manage to outwit him and keep it.
McBrooms Wonderful One-Acre Farm?
“When Josh McBroom learns that the eighty acres of Iowa farmland he’s purchased are all stacked up on top of each other at the bottom of a muddy little pond, he thinks he’s been bamboozled. But McBroom knows he’s got the better of the bargain when the pond dries up to reveal an acre of soil so rich that seeds spring up into full-grown plants in no time and even nickels grow into quarters.”
This is McBroom’s wonderful one-acre farm by Sid Fleischman (first published in 1972 and one of a number of McBroom books) When Josh McBroom learns that the eighty acres of Iowa farmland he’s purchased are all stacked up on top of each other at the bottom of a muddy little pond, he thinks he’s been bamboozled. But McBroom knows he’s got the better of the bargain when the pond dries up to reveal an acre of soil so rich that seeds spring up into full-grown plants in no time and even nickels grow into quarters.