In 1992, after 25 years at Harvard and John F. Kennedy Universities, Shepherd Bliss shifted his teaching and counseling work to a far more subtle and congenial place—a small organic farm in Sebastopol, Sonoma County. Instead of standing in front of a blackboard lecturing on religion and psychology, he now offers tours of his two-acre spread, where he raises boysenberries, apples, chickens, and honeybees.

These unique tours begin with a quiet moment in a redwood grove, then meander past the vegetable garden, the chickens, and the berries, past ancient oaks, and through a meadow to a creek that flows into a marsh where an endangered lily grows. En route it becomes clear how everything fits together.

Bliss doesn’t lecture. Instead he invites visitors to notice. If someone asks about the tall bamboo poles around the chicken pens, he’ll explain that they deter hawks, though not ravens. He may add, as he did on this late spring afternoon: “The chickens give me eggs, cultivation, beauty. They eat snails, they recycle, and they go in on their own.” His flock numbers about 80 and includes up to 23 varieties. He enjoys the diversity. He sells the eggs directly to customers. As the rooster wanders by he may add, “Some people don’t like roosters because they’re a bother, but I think a flock needs a rooster.”

Why the newspapers weighed down by oranges under the boysenberries? The papers are mulch; the oranges keep them in place and add acidity to the soil. Bliss gets juiced oranges free of charge. He also adds woodash, from neighbors’ fireplaces. “My berries cost a lot of money—about $4 a pound,” he says. “At first I sold them low, but other farmers said, ‘That’s unfair, you have a premium crop.’” About 400 customers come to pick and buy, including “a lot of older people who are used to making pies.”

The tour may diverge into talk of economics, aesthetics, or wildlife conservation, depending on individual interests. Bliss takes his time. He is a teacher, and part of the slow food movement. For an organic farmer, satisfaction comes as much from process as from product. When someone notices a scythe propped against the house, Bliss says that by using this tool instead of a power mower he can spot baby oaks in the grass and cut around them. A neighbor adds, “You get into a rhythm. You hear the cutting and smell the hay.”

Bliss, who comes from an Iowa farm family, realized he “belonged on the land” in the 1970s, after reading Helen and Scott Nearing’s Living the Good Life and then visiting their farm in Maine. He chose to farm in Sonoma County, partly because it’s a leading organic farming region. Now kindred spirits come to learn from him. Today’s group includes Stuart and Denise Schroeder, who are starting an “all human- and horse-draft farm” five miles toward the coast, where they will offer environmental education with a taste of living history.