posted 6 years ago
I agree with Nicole that it can take quite a long time, with a lot of effort, to get things going properly. I agree with you that you will likely undereat and overwork if you go in with high expectations of the homestead providing your food and general needs.
Don't plan on eating from your farm in the first couple of years. Do ask what people around you are having success growing, and see how many calories you could produce/would actually enjoy eating/how much time it takes to grow that particular item. Then repeat for another food. For example, we can grow potatoes really well without irrigation, so it takes perhaps 2-3 hours laying on compost earlier in the year, then 4-8 hours work to plant, then maybe a few minutes of weeding where necessary, then 4-8 hours to harvest-- for a really significant number of calories. BUT if we relied completely on those calories it would be incredibly stressful because there was that year when a mole rat ate all the potatoes (apparently raw potatoes are just fine for him, or maybe he just destroyed the plants and then chuckled evilly in his tunnel full of potatoes), and then there was a year when our neighbour's piglet got loose...
Another example: I figured out would take about 26 well-producing granadilla/passionfruit vines for give us enough calories to feed one person entirely on granadillas, and I focused in on that goal as something tangible. (we're all eating a lot of granadillas now, but they're more like 1/7 of our diet given that there are 7 of us). These vines don't take any work now that they're established, but for every plant that got established, 4 died as our conditions are very harsh-- I got really good at propagation. So it took 3 years before we had success, with the side benefit that I now sell propagate and sell vines as a side income. Then there's tamarillo: I have planted 10 trees and have just one that is doing fantastically and giving lots of fruit... but then I found I don't like the fruit very much (thankfully have one son who does) and there's only so much jam one needs. But again, I learned I can grow tamarillo very well from seed and sell plenty of trees (and feel pretty relaxed about planting more of them because i know I can grow them more or less free, with little time input). We have a lot of guavas, but otherwise most of our fruit trees have yet to produce. I tried to make olive oil with our olives and it was a disaster. We do grow a lot of vegetables, but they are fairly time-intensive, and if something unexpected happens we can lose a crop very quickly.
If I did it again, I could [maybe] spend more time planning and not consider myself somehow above burn-out. We had our third baby, built 2 small houses (one for my nuclear family, then 2 years later, 1 for my parents), planted 100s of trees/shrubs, put of a lot of fencing and started a vegetable garden on our 1 acre plot-- all in the past 3.5 years. And it was very exhausting. Not just the actual food production, which is only a small part of the whole picture, but the food production together with the child-rearing (children do not emerge from the womb loving farming, in my experience-- if they sense it takes time away from them, they may even hate it), the finding time to work, the various projects (the realization that some projects inevitably fail, and have to be redone).
We're starting to produce a lot more food, with a lot less effort, in the past 12 months (year 3 or 4)-- probably now it is about 1-2 hours a day of work for this food. But it would have been largely impossible without the hard, fruitless (literally) labour that preceded it.
One challenge for me is that we put in so much effort into setting up our farm that I cannot imagine ever having to do it again-- yet many of the additions have no monetary value in our urban environment. So I'd recommend, if you're in a space that is constantly changing/uncertain (like ours in Cape Town), go slowly and remember that we cannot control all the factors that allow us to stay in one place indefinitely. That is, don't invest everything in one idea- it's too much pressure. And do keep at least one day job in the homestead unit, on the one hand it adds stress because I don't have enough time, but on the other hand, not having financial stress, and not having debt, was really helpful for us.