Learning, observing, and planning for my 5yr plan

Thank you for this site; it looks like a wealth of information. I'll be using the search feature so forgive me if I accidentally reply or ask a question on a 10yr old thread, LOL!
I'm not yet on my land. It's below the Finger Lakes in NY, USA, and it has been in my family as hunting grounds for decades. Lots of deer. Sometime in the next year I will be buying it and starting to work it little by little, with the goal of living off the land as much as possible, especially as we go into retirement and will need a..... "perennial income"? lol, I just made that up, I think, lol! I'm currently in NJ due to family obligations for a while, and will probably go back & forth a few years.
On the one hand I wish I could go there full time right NOW, but on the other hand I see the value in waiting, because I have the luxury of observing the land & weather patterns, learning, and planning. I feel like a schoolgirl daydreaming out the window about all the things I'll do, lol

Any advice on planning is appreciated.
Goal #1 = Now, from NJ in the cold, I want to make maps of the land. There are a number of wonderful features & possibilities to consider.
Goal #2 = I'll be there in early spring, and I want to walk through the wooded areas and map those separately, noting what I can identify, for considering forest food options, then map again when I go back in summer and can recognize everything that will be fully grown.

Give me more things I can do NOW, from afar! So far I'm just brainstorming.

The Finger Lakes area is a beautiful part of the country. At least for 6 months out of the year! I have very fond memories of learning about sailing on Canandaigua Lake.
I have a very similar situation to yours that recently came to a finish about two months ago after a 7-year effort to relocate to our current home.
We have owned this land since 2006. We spent several years clearing brush and deadfall, but did not start building in earnest until 2017. We lived a 5-hour drive from the land and planned everything remotely.

Here is my advice:
1. After surveying the land make a site plan of the land. Determining where the residence, barn, shop, whatever, will be situated, is next.
Check the county assessor's website to see if they have online GIS mapping of the parcel with aerial photos. If not, check Google Earth.  Assessor's sites will usually show you a rough estimate of where the property lines lay. Google Earth does not.
Either have the property professionally surveyed and property lines staked or see if you can locate a plat for the property at the county recorder and physically locate your property corners. Buy a handheld GPS device and save the corner locations in it for future reference. Get some flagging tape and mark the corners.
2. Start dreaming and when you dream, dream big! You can plan your build in one of two ways, either make a list of everything you want and list them all in order of priority or start with the basic "must haves" and another list of "want to haves".
3. Start with installing the fundamental necessities of power and water.  These will make construction possible and also make extended stays on the property in a camper comfortable. When planning water, think for the future and how the water system will work to feed all the buildings or water use areas. I prefer a storage tank that then feeds a pressure pump on the surface. Place the tank in an elevated area so in case of power failure, you can still use gravity to feed the buildings, stock tanks, garden, whatever.
4. Do the research upfront about any zoning restrictions, Landowner Associations, permit requirements, etc. that you may have to navigate during the building process. Start looking at alternative building practices and any building codes applicable to your land.
5. Get to know your neighbors! This is probably the most important item because, community is everything. The people who live in that area are the BEST source of information about what it takes to live there. Make friends, go to community events, participate in local activities and patronize the local businesses and Farmer's markets. Get email addresses and/or phone numbers and keep in touch over the years. Touching base with some locals during the winter to see how everything is going will be remembered and appreciated.

Welcome to the forum.

congratulation on getting land.

Your plan sounds like a good one.

For Goal #3 you might plan on good fencing.

I live where we have lots of deer and other critters.

There are several book published on gardening where there are deer.  Karen Chapman's new book, "Deer Resistant Design," from Timber Press might be good.

Congrats on your new purchase and beginning your journey! The first thing I would recommend doing from afar is figure our your water capacity and then access. If you get those two things right on your new property, that makes the rest easy and fun. While you will need to make adjustments after monitoring your water flows on the property in person, you can get a good idea of your capture potential looking at the contours of your property and historical climate data. Plan to eliminate runoff immediately, whether that's with earthworks or revegetation.  The goal is to keep the water that enters your property, on your property.

A permaculture homestead in a temperate climate like the Finger Lakes Region, has a lot of water advantages, but times are changing and it is a good idea to plan your water capture to handle maximum water events and minimum water events. You can use this tool: https://contourmapcreator.urgr8.ch/ for getting contours. You can use contours to help figure out where your water is going to run off and where you might want to put earthworks like swales to capture it.

Min/max rainfall is harder to find. You can google your location for max/min temps. You can a good historical climate data for your location from Meteoblue. You may have to do your best with the data you can find, but I recommend adding 10% to 15% to that total for your estimates.

In summary, I recommend you first think about turning your property into a sponge, before you turn it into a food paradise. Good luck with everything!

Wow, thank you guys so much, so far! I didn't mention what's already there: a small 20yr old post & beam house (yay!), which is just one big room (a basic bathroom/utility room is technically a separate room with real walls, thankfully, but with just planks across beams as a ceiling, lol). My dad & his buddies would crash there a couple times a year and NOT clean or take care of anything. My dad passed away a year ago, and my husband and I are the only family that ever helped him maintain the place and want it, so this past year we spent 3 separate week-long sessions hauling out moldy old furniture, mouse-eaten bedding, sleeping bags, jackets, etc. We had to throw everything out and spray the ceilings for mold. There's a well and indoor plumbing but the water smells like sulfur so we bring bottled water. I assume one day we'll need to get the well checked & fixed somehow. It hasn't been looked at in 35yrs, and the septic tank hasn't been looked at in the 20yrs of this new house.

There's a wood stove (full of dead birds & debris, lol) and a questionable gas heater in the wall that we don't leave on unattended. We bought some thrift-store cabinets and mapped out a kitchen (there's a stove with a questionable oven), and a small fridge, and there's a kitchen sink with wood counter around it but I don't consider it food-safe, lol.

- We added some baseboard in a mouse-repelling effort.
- There's a shed.
- There's a pile of overgrown rubble of an old barn, which they re-used wood from to build the house. There are great rocks in the pile, but also a huge pile of decaying green asphalt roofing we're stuck with.
- There's the foundation of the previous house (which I was in, in the 90's & have pics of) which was burned down on purpose (it was beyond repair), filled in, and we now call "the groundhog holes", lol. We're toying with excavating it one day and maybe we'd have a giant root cellar & storage! Maybe.
- There's a mostly-dried up pond that only has an inch or two of water in the spring, and is mud or dry the rest of the year.
- There are 2 areas of woods, and a few fields between them.
- My dad said many years ago there's a spring in the aspen grove, but he never wanted to investigate.

Most of all, there's POTENTIAL!
Can you see why I'm so excited, like a little kid?
I feel like I've hit the jackpot! We still have to arrange buying it from my dad's wife, but for now we can go there when we have time (it's 5hrs away) and do what we want.

Hi Kim,

Welcome to Permies.

Well, now. It sounds like you already have a lot of the basics lined out and started. That's great!
The pond might just be viable with a little excavator work. Make it a little (or a lot) deeper and it might just become a permanent pond. I know that way back in time, NYS used to provide stock fish for private ponds. You should check with the Game & Fish agency and find out if they still do that sort of thing. A friend of mine's father had a place in Westerlo and he had his pond stocked with bass and perch.  After a couple of years, he started finding crappie and sunfish as well. They just somehow showed up. If you build it, they will come. Probably bring a bunch of frogs with them too.
I wouldn't worry too much about the septic system. A well-designed septic system will work forever as long as the leach field doesn't become clogged. Our first septic system was already 20+ years old when we moved in, and we went 18 more years without any problems. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. The only issue I can foresee is whether you plan to expand the house and add more residents. Septic systems are usually sized per number of bedrooms.  If the current system is sized for one bedroom, adding more to the load may overwork the system.

The sulfur in the water is a common thing with wells and upstate NY is no exception. Lots of folks I knew on wells in upstate had sulfur water when I was a kid. Most folks just dealt with it, but now we have all sorts of water filtration systems available. A simple RO system under the kitchen sink will take care of your cooking and drinking water. If you are looking for a whole-house system, I have had very good experiences with expresswater.com.  Our well here had a bit of sulfur when we first drilled, but after pumping several hundred gallons (maybe even thousands), it disappeared. A whole-house filtration system took it from there. I would suggest a carbon block filter of some sort, just to take the dirt and sediment out. You are pumping water out of the ground after all.

Very exciting!

Welcome to Permies Kim!  This is very exciting! Your enthusiasm is infectious haha. Im in a very similar boat to you, so will be following along with what others are sharing.

I also just acquired my own land in a temperate climate (zone 7), which is undeveloped, has no existing water sources aside from rain and snow melt, and has deer regularly visiting. Ive gone all in and have invested everything into the land. Now I am also very much focusing on potential "perennial income" sources, although for now its only been seasonal with low paying odd jobs here and there helping within my own community.  Building local relationships is also foundational, and is a form of currency that is more resilient than anything else.  

I'll be using the search feature so forgive me if I accidentally reply or ask a question on a 10yr old thread, LOL!

This is encouraged here!  We love to see older threads brought back to life that are relevant.  It is great to see what information has stayed true, and what has evolved.  

Any advice on planning is appreciated. Goal #1 = Now, from NJ in the cold, I want to make maps of the land. There are a number of wonderful features & possibilities to consider.
Goal #2 = I'll be there in early spring, and I want to walk through the wooded areas and map those separately, noting what I can identify, for considering forest food options, then map again when I go back in summer and can recognize everything that will be fully grown.

Which possibilities have you considered?  

Have you already received a PDC?  (This helps us to see what basic  knowledge you may already have in regards to ecological design)

One of my own great inspirations lately has been the Agrarians platform, where scales of permanence provide a sequence for evaluating and developing land, with a focus on aspects like climate, landform, and water - before moving into the more flexible elements like infrastructure, plantings, and animals.  

Creating the base maps is a great place to begin, and for a lot of designers is a prerequisite.  

Do you have a certain budget available for this?

How big is the land that you are working with?

Im in the process of doing this myself at the moment, but with a limited budget cannot afford to pay for the high definition maps with tight contour lines of around 0.5 meters created by surveyors, or other tech savvy permaculture designers who use drones and computer programs like GIS  For now I am just taking older surveys of my property to find boundaries, and soon will be going out with a compass, a 100m surveyors measuring tape, some stick poles, and an A-frame or Bunyip water level.  Ill be making sketches onto some graph paper and marking points based on measurements taken.  My goal is to identify any potential "key points", which then can determine where to create "key-lines", and then eventually a "Master Pattern Line".  This should help determine how to proceed with identification of all future element locations, as well as help to follow the permaculture principles of least effort for greatest effect, stacking functions, designing from patterns to details, and using edges and valuing the marginal.

Give me more things I can do NOW, from afar! So far I'm just brainstorming.

How well do you know the local ecosystem?  

Are you able to identify native, endemic, or indigenous plants/animals? Or "weed" species, which might actually be useful in some way?  

Have you taken soil samples yet, or explored government web pages that offer existing maps of historical date and geology in the area?

One of the counterintuitive insights I just had recently came from a government website where we can find maps of the types of soil in our area, as well as LIDAR.  The soil maps helped to reveal the the lowest spot on my property where I want to eventually build a pond is a type of soil that has almost no clay content, while the highest point on the property actually has a different type of soil that is prone to water logging and compaction.  I have taken a few soil samples from the lowest area and put them into glass jars to determine the sand-silt-clay percentage, and confirmed there to be almost zero clay in the spot that intuitively would have been the best spot for a pond!  

Its great that you are not rushing into making any decisions and drastic changes with your place.  Observing and Interacting really can make a huge difference.  Your future self will be very thankful!  

Some other clarifying questions are coming to mind that might help direct this conversation:  

Do you have any existing water resources on the property?

How many acres are you working with, and what are you envisioning for it?

What does "perennial Income" look like for you? Food production, value added products, eco-tourism, social media content creation, or something else?

Are there any local permaculture or farming groups that you can connect with?

Im looking forward to seeing how your journey unfolds, and hope you will continue sharing.  Please keep us updated with your progress, struggles/challenges, and wins!  We are all learning from each others experiences.

Welcome and congratulations, Kim!

I can totally relate to your enthusiasm, I was also the daydreaming schoolgirl some time ago.
The dream is now reality and I'm super happy about it, even though things are more complex and energy & time consuming than in my daydream :)

There's SO MUCH good advice here already, you'll have your hands full!
And yet, I'll add mine:

In the daydreaming/planning phase, away from the Place of Paradise, I was spending a lot of time on internet, gathering information and coming across all kinds of exciting articles and images.
I found it helpful to create Pinterest boards and save my findings there.
It's still my Stash of Ideas, and there's a board "Visualisation" with just images of how I thought it, the place and dwelling, would look like.
That last board has been a great tool for communicating the desired look and feel of the house we're now renovating.

There's also the "Bookmark topic" option for saving interesting threads here on Permies! It's on top (and bottom) of every thread.

Good luck, have fun!