I hope everyone
had great Christmas and New Years’ celebrations, and that now you are excited
about what 2013 holds! Every day is
precious, make the most of it.
OK, now
something that has been on my mind for a while (forgive the word-heavy post!).
I know we have set up this blog ostensibly as a place to talk about our
journey to find our own corner of the world to grow our own food, and we
haven't really been talking about it here.
But that doesn't mean that we aren't thinking about it. And I mean a lot!
Plus, we haven't
really told many people what we are planning to do. Why?
Mainly because they will almost certainly think we are crazy for
chucking a couple of well-paid 9 to 5 careers in for this madcap notion of
growing our own food with any “real” work fitting in around this. But then the people who read this blog have
read the "why" in my Meaning of Life post earlier in 2012, so now I
am going to put some of our ideas out there.
Here is the
crazy plan:
1. Buy a property with the qualities listed
below.
2. Get cracking growing our own food, focusing
on heritage and heirloom varieties for a focus on the best taste (we are all
about great-tasting food).
3. Year one - chickens, a couple of weaner pigs
and my personal challenge: bees. Have a
crack at making cider/perries with our first fruit harvest. Start a farmer's market stall selling any
surplus produce we don't barter away.
4. Year two - a goat for milk, another couple of
pigs, plus a beef steer. Mead-making
anyone?
5. Year three - ducks, a sow that we will use for
breeding, with a couple of pigs, another beef steer, and some lambs.
6. Year four - sheep, and perhaps a heifer for
milk and breeding (depending on how we go with the goat!)
7. Year five - commence farmstay. Actually we may start this sooner as we get
going and need extra hands but growing enough food will be the focus.
We will
supplement our food as much as we can with whatever we can get for free from
nature - fish, venison, rabbit, duck, goose etc.
It is a very
rough plan at the moment, and we have no idea whether we have enough cash to
actually last that long, or whether we can make enough at farmer's markets to
pay the bills that are inevitably going to arrive. As an accountant I would do a budget, but I
have no notion as to what things are going to cost, so it won't be that useful!
So, what do we
want in a property? We have quite a list
worked up, and each point has been the result of much discussion.
In no particular
order we want:
- lots of
space. We don't want to be able to see
our neighbours and we need enough land to grow our fruit and vegies plus enough
pasture for animals.
- a mix of
native bush and pasture. We want to have
some bush that is suited for camping and generally giving the native fauna a
place to live.
- our own water
supply. We know that water is precious,
so a creek and a dam or two, or maybe a spring, would be ideal to ensure we can
keep our garden growing and putting food on the table.
- established
orchard. It takes a long time to get
fruit trees up to full productivity so an apple and pear orchard, with other
fruit trees, already established, is a must.
- north-facing
block. Plants like sun. We like sun.
Enough said. Oh, and keep in mind
we are talking the southern hemisphere here people!
- a house, of no
particular quality. We would like to
build our own house. I have a lot of ideas
in mind for a very energy-efficient house that is incredibly cheap to run and
is very self-sustaining. But before we
can build it we need somewhere to live, and we will also need a house or
cottage for the farmstay business component of our plan.
-
outbuildings. No real rocket science to
this one, if there is already a chicken coop that is one less thing for us to
build, plus we will need somewhere for the vehicles.
- in the right
area. This should really be number
one. We need a place that is in an area
where people are either doing something similar or have experience at doing it. We don't want to reinvent the wheel, we want
to use other people's knowledge as best as we can on our journey and also not
try to do everything. Why try to get
into making goat's cheese if the family down the road are making award-winning
stuff that they are happy to trade for some pork products? Plus we need an outlet for surplus
produce. We need a town with a farmer's
market or something similar within reasonable distance to allow us to shift all
those things that you suddenly have a glut of. And we can't be an excessive
distance from an airport. When we progress
to the aforementioned stage two this will be more important.
- reduced chance
of bushfires. We aren't spending years
building a place and a business up to support us and then having it go up in
smoke in 30 minutes and have to start from scratch when we are older and less
able to do the hard physical labour.
This may be hard but we will be looking for properties with plans in
place to manage this risk.
So that is it,
pretty demanding I know but we can trade a few things about, and we will
probably end up adding to this list.
I don't know
where in here we would have time for anything like building a house, but we
will see how it pans out. We know that
we are not really going to get vacations in the first few years, hence the
massive trip now, but we have a few ideas for how we can get holidays once
things are ticking along and I'll flesh these out in another post.
So what do you
think? Are we crazy? What would you suggest we change or plan
differently? Would you pay to come stay
on our farm and eat our quality food, and maybe help out around the farm if you
feel so inclined?
