m hoffman

John Weiland wrote:That 80% went fallow or was planted with some prairie grass, whatever we could afford with the meager income at the time.  The weeds that followed were ugly, but there was no HOA telling us what we could or could not do, so we just mowed when we could and accepted that is was not going to be photographed for 'Sunset Magazine' any time soon.

Oh thanks John, you answered my question about letting it go fallow as I was writing it.

Thanks everyone!  Super helpful.
Sounds like pretty much everyone agrees, then, which is great:  It won't be getting in over our heads if we just don't try to do something with all of that land from the start.

Which makes perfect sense...most of the houses I've been looking at are more like .5 acres or so, which is as much as I really expected to use. Enough for a kitchen garden and a few fruit trees, and maybe some berry bushes eventually.  But who knows... with more than a half acre, there'd be a lot of room to grow.

It looks like the current owners have been mowing the whole thing, regularly. Which I honestly can't imagine doing -- that's a whole lot of grass to mow!  So, I assume it'd be ok if I just mowed as much as I wanted for a garden and a yard for the kids, and let nature take its course on the rest of it until I wanted to do something with it?


I'm getting kind of excited about this idea...

So, my wife and I and two young boys are looking at buying a new house. We're currently in suburbs in North Carolina (USA), and we need some advice from folks who have done the homesteading thing in earnest.

One of the houses that recently popped up on the market in the area we're looking at has a nice house that ticks all the boxes for us .... and it's on 7 acres of pasture.  We haven't visited it yet, but it looks nice on paper.  What I'm wondering is – is that getting in way over our heads?  As soon as I saw it, I started thinking "I could plant an orchard! And I really don't want to mow that kind of grass, so I'd just get some goats. And ducks. And a couple dogs, and...."   But I clearly don't know the first thing about what it's *really* like to take care of these kinds of things, so worried that I'll fall for the romantic notion of "just get a couple goats and ... " and end up with a second full-time job taking care of it all.

To give you a sense of where we're coming from: we currently live on a quarter-acre lot in a pretty laid-back neighborhood, and have a couple fig trees and had a pretty nice ~60 sq ft garden. But there is an HOA in the neighborhood, and after several years some crazy people took over and forced us to take it out ("no vegetables visible from the street"). That has us looking at moving somewhere where that isn't an issue.

We don't have ambitions of being entirely off the grid, but we do have romantic notions about having a few chickens (or ducks...I really want Muscovy ducks for some reason) and a nice vegetable garden, and that kind of thing.


So, for folks that really do hobby farming, or homesteading, or just live on some land... any advice?

Also, maybe you can help me dream: what would you do with 7 acres of land, if you also had a full-time job and two boys under 5 to take care of?  Does that sound more exciting or daunting to you?  


Thanks for any advice or ideas you can offer!