Hi Permies,
This is my first post, so please
be nice!
My husband and I are thinking about moving from our half
acre suburban homestead to something a bit bigger further out of town, around 10 acres or so.
We're both
vegetarian, and we'd be looking to produce around 50-60% of our own food, and have
enough surplus to trade with other
local producers for the majority of the rest of our food. Main crops would be orchard
fruit, eggs and value-added preserves. So we'd be looking to keep a small flock of poultry, waterfowl, and perhaps a few sheep to keep the grass in the orchards down, and the rest would be plantings.
We're in Australia, and I
think our USDA zone would be about zone 9. The area gets about 40-50" rain annually.
We're still very much in the 'looking around' stages, but I was hoping for some input from you guys about site selection. There are two properties that I'm interested in - one is almost completely flat, on a very slight slope, and one is in s small undulating valley that runs roughly east-west with a small seasonal creek running through the middle. Pictures attached (I hope!).
But we're not necessarily going to buy either of them, as we've just started looking. If you could choose your ideal site for these circumstances, what would it be like? What features would you want from the
land?