Starting a new farm!

Hi all

We just closed on a farm with about 7 acres of flat, well-sunlit land in middle/west Georgia. We want to start a personal vegetable garden, an herbal apothecary garden, and a cut flower field. I'm thinking the vegetable and herb garden will be less than a 1/4 acre and the flowers about 1/2 acre to start - perhaps smaller. Our soil test shows a pH of 6.5. Would anyone be willing to give us advice on the location of our gardens and processes to get started? I have a detailed plan I'm happy to share with anyone willing to take a look at it. We want to do permaculture principles and no till.

Thank you in advance!

Jen

Congratulations on closing! pH 6.5 in Georgia is a solid starting point, you won't be fighting the soil much at all. Exciting that you've got space for all three projects, the cut flower field sounds like the fun part.

Congratulations!  Sounds like you are off to a great start.

My only suggestion would be to start slowly and only plant what your family will eat.

Later on if you want to do a market garden then branch out to foods that will sell.

Congratulations, that's exciting!

I'd like to see your plan!

Without seeing it - as already mentioned - starting small and experimenting is a great idea. You'll learn and improve things without risking too much wasted efforts. On a property of any size, definitely pay attention to relative location & how you're going to move through the property on daily basis. Inefficiencies can get annoying, so it pays out to think about the flows and relationships between elements before committing to it.

With that amount of land, you can also explore the option of creating a food forest with syntropic agroforestry principles (Byron Grows on Youtube has very useful design-oriented videos). I personally find managing food forests (especially when it's more organised, repeating, row-based patterns) more enjoyable than vegetable gardens.