[shearling]

Following on from reading about the 'going green' house for sale anf under 10 acres not being enough. Just been round my estate    got three quail eggs (three girls, one boy), a hen egg (two girls, one boy), patted the dogs (2 girls), checked the sheep (6 girls, 4 boys), checked the new chooks (10 yet to tell me  ). Later to collect the beans for dinner, pick the beetroot (boil and pickle), ready to pick the apples for storage and cider production. Pick remaining plums for storage....We cannot sustain oursleves fully, but flower, fruit, veg, and alcohol bill dropped to nearly nill (due my first lemon grown in the house for three years). Not keeping pigs or having enough older birds to cover meat production fully yet. We got photvoltaic before the governments offer so only get 8p per KWh, instead of 45p and yes ouch that hurts. So we eat and live well - but not enough to pay for university fees   

[MelRice]

I could have written the last post myself...glad to see theres someone else in a similar situation ! Just done my morning rounds Ive only got about two acres all told. This am starts as normal being greeted by the horse "why am I not out then yet?", so he goes out, last new section in his present "field" tomorow I have to move the electric tape over to the next plot.

"yes sheep Im comming" I extent thier electric fence avoiding the apple tree that needs picking by me not sheep. (Mum and this years twin girls and last years girl)

Feed the ducklings,they are three weeks oud now still in a pen although they are quite big (Four hatched in the incubator) ((Theres Quail eggs in there now to make christmas birds))

Let all the hens out, one big one still laying (4), moan at the Bantams as I only get 1 egg from the three of them (+ 1 boy). The next lot of chicks havent decided whose who yet (7)

Check the vege patch...oops the courgettes have got huge again (Im sure I checked them yesterday) Out onto the streetside table with a donations jar...I really must come and weed the beans again.

Like you we want photovoltaic but the grants here come as tax breaks, quite generous ones, my little job does not even bring us near to the tax bracket so no help with PV.

Now in munching toast, checking computer, must do those apples today into juice (for cider) and those plums need picking...Just another slice THEN I WILL get on...

[Cavendish]

Hi, as a wannabe small holder i ahve a couple of questions to ask if you do not mind answering?

My first question is how do you afford to buy these types of properties? I live in the south and even in my wildest dreams there is no way on earth I could afford something round here with a big garden let alone 2 or more acres.

My second question is, how do you support yourself, If you spend alot of your time managing your small holding and have a mortgage and bills to pay and still need money left over to do things with and of course afford all of the animals feed etc?....

I know that you will be making alot of your own food and potentially make items to sell but unless you are raking it in you would still need a sizable income to cover the martgage and bills.

Sorry if I seem too up front with my questions, I have been doing my sums and cannot figure out I could ever afford to have the lifesyle that I aspire to.

[Fowgill Farm]

Cavendish
No worries about your questions, land prices in the South have always been a lot greater than for example here in the North and you'll find the majority of people on here live in rural areas off the beaten track or have bought properties that need serious renovation and upkeep.
The other thing is that most of us also hold down full time jobs as well as running our smallholdings to keep the wolf from the door or at the very least one of us works, and we do without, holidays, buy clothes & footwear as necessary not on a whim, and make do & mend equipment and household stuff.
You will also find that quite a few of us have had to wait until we are in out late forties to set out on this path so we've done the work, paid off a goodly chunk of our mortgage and have had a bit more cash to play with.
Its not easy setting out, we started off 7 years ago and are just getting to the point where we can actually start to enjoy the bounties of all our hard work but keeping a sMallholding is a bit like painting the forth road bridge its neverending upkeep and maintenance.
HTh
Mandy 

[Cavendish]

Thanks Mandy, I suppose I need to keep chipping away at the dream, I am just about to get the keys to my first house, so hopefully once the years roll by I will be able to find a little smallholding somewhere off the beaten track.

But first things first, I need to build my first raised beds!!!..

[shearling]

Well we are motgaged to the hilt, bought a wreck (last in several that we have done up ourselves and then sold on to afford the mortgage) and doing it up slowly - to be livable in - ourselves mainly but with specialist help from a local tradesman who is brilliant. Price of property varies in the south so we moved to where we could afford, ie not a nice commute to London.

For the last 20 years no central heating, no booze, no fags, few trips out, no holidays, one car shared by four, few new clothes and these only for paid work, no new furniture, carpets, etc. Heating is two log burners. we spend all summer and every weekend cutting wood. cut down/copse trees on the edge of our field and clear up fields from locals who cannot be bothered to deal with the wood, until its in a packet. All spare time when not on computer and TAS spent on paid work or doing up house, caring for livestock, garden, veg etc. We get up at 5.30am everyday and work solidly (one way or another) until 10.30pm or later when needed. No time to make items to sell (not enough profit in terms of time vs value for money). Animal feed is not that expensive and some just mainly eat grass, or plants we have grown from seed and they get straight from the veg plot (not via kitchen). We need to buy very little food and are pragmatic about stuff such as flour (not going to mill my own - time vs value for money again), coffee, tea etc. Routines are what manages the animals and the land, mostly they require little intervention and when they do, such as lambing, then that when I take my holiday from my paid job. So you see for us there is no money left to do things with other than survive and one day we may have to sell to pay off the mortgage but thats life. It has always been our dream to have this way of life and it has taken 20 years of scrimping and saving to get to where we are. So make a plan, stick to it and maybe in 20 years you could get here to.

PS The luxury is having the dogs who do not really pay their way except for company and fun.  

[shearling]

Hi Cavendish, good luck with house move and the raised beds. Why not get some quail - good egg layers and not too much work or noise, either that or chooks. That way you get a tasty egg and it will start you off to the 'good life'. no need for a cockerel. We kept bantams in our previous houses in towns. Although we have good jobs we made most of our profit buying and selling houses, buying ones people did not want (too much work to do) and selling them on when the market was right.

[Fleecewife]

So there are two opposite ways of looking at things - buy the biggest most run-down house you can afford and do it up to sell so you can afford the next project (make a TV programme about it if you can which will up the resale price and be quite a nice little earner too), or buy the smallest house you can find (again needing a lot of work) but with the land you want, and stay there.   We went for the second option after many years of looking at properties which were too big, or just too much work, or too close to town so too expensive.  Unfortunately by the time we found our place our children were leaving home, so they missed out on a country life.  We had had two allotments for many years though so always plenty of veg.  Now all our grandchildren can enjoy our life with us.
I sometimes idly look through the properties with land for sale and I am often struck by the fact that the house is big and expensive with just a couple of acres.  Maintenance costs alone for such large properties (without even mentioning the mortgage, although mortgages are eventually paid off  ) are going to mean you would have to have a well-paid job to support them. Often it is the old farmhouse which could not be supported by the acreage the farmer had, so he sells it off and builds himself a small efficient bungalow.
We have never made a profit from our holding although our sales of pedigree sheep and eggs cover the price of winter hard feed for all the livestock - it then just becomes a big garden from the point of view of paying for it.
Like the others, we don't have holidays or buy expensive clothes, go out for meals (why would you when your own produce is so much better than anything a restaurant can serve?) or have expensive taste in anything.  We buy mostly second hand equipment and my OH does it up and maintains it. Our enjoyment comes from living where we do and how we do.  We have worked hard but now with my major health problem we are having to cut right back on the animals.  But adaptability to circumstances is one of the skills of the smallholder, so things go on but differently.
Walking (or in my case now trundling in my all-terrain mob trike  ) the boundaries and just looking at what we have - animals, hedges, crops, equipment, sheds (you can never have too many sheds), produce, a wonderful view, neighbours a respectable distance away, eachother - it's just great. Our estate, as shearling says  

[Cavendish]

Thanks Shearling & Fleecewife, your descriptions of your workloads certainly gives me alot of food for thought, I will certainly be looking into chooks, but not sure we quite have enough space for them, I am intending to put in 2 or 3 raised beds, which will then leave a little lawn area for us to bask in the sun when it comes out, I dont think the Mrs would be too thrillled about our new garden turning into an alotment straight away but I shall certainly try!.
She is enthusiastic about being self suffucient, but it's me that does most of the work in the garden, although she does make a good victorian chutney!.

Property prices in Caversham, Reading, are insane but still not as mad as in London. Our ultimate ideal is to relocate to the Wilshire / somerset area, although they are not cheap areas we would get alot more for our money then we are currently getting, which could involve a small plot of land for me to teach the children about the world of self sufficiency, when they arrive. 

[Cavendish]

Maybe I could boost the resale value of my house with a new TV series "Piss Poor and Green"

[Blueeyes]

Hiya all,  just sat and read these posts with interest. We are living in a 4 bed bungalow with a cpl of acres of land and best of all no neighbours!!! We moved here a year ago and bought it as our daughter is in a wheelchair and wanted some more independence and at 7yrs old it was getting harder carrying her up and down stairs! The land was basically a bonus, I am a proper city girl who at 35 yrs old still enjoys lunching with the girls and nights out and so was unsure how I'd manage. Fast forward a year and we now have a dog  , a rabbit  , 2 Shetland ponies  , 6 Shetland sheep  , and will have ducks  by the end of the week- everyone is amazed, I'm in wellies as often as in high heels  and yep I'm loving it 

I really consider us accidental smallholders as we've never planned this, or to be honest even wanted it, but we wouldn't change it for anything, we've grown all our own fruit and veg and also enough to keep all friends and family going, the only thing we don't do is eat our animals    we consider everything we get as additions to our family and so will be with us till their natural end!

I'm lucky I guess as I don't work (though my hubby works enough for 3 ppl, but still manages to be at home lots!) so I basically get to enjoy our country life, playing with the animals and having friends over to visit, as they all like to see what we've got up to recently!

We like a few of you bought and sold a couple of properties well and managed to achieve this, there's a lot to be done on the house and land, and I didnt realise how much  continual maintenance is needed, but we can see the end picture, living the good life in a house designed for our needs and with only the sounds of wildlife to accompany us!

I don't know if I could manage without central heating, new clothes, new furniture etc etc, but I'd be willing to sacrifice a lot, I hope you manage to achieve your dreams and till then good look with the raised beds 

Xx

[SallyintNorth]

So there are two opposite ways of looking at things - buy the biggest most run-down house you can afford and do it up to sell so you can afford the next project (make a TV programme about it if you can which will up the resale price and be quite a nice little earner too), or buy the smallest house you can find (again needing a lot of work) but with the land you want, and stay there.   We went for the second option after many years of looking at properties which were too big, or just too much work, or too close to town so too expensive.  Unfortunately by the time we found our place our children were leaving home, so they missed out on a country life.  We had had two allotments for many years though so always plenty of veg.  Now all our grandchildren can enjoy our life with us. ...

That was a lovely post, FW.   

There is a third way.  There are a surprising number of intentional communities around (including several within commuting distance of London), where a number of like-minded people - singletons, couples and families - share an 'estate' and the work of running it.  Many have jobs outside the community and some work full-time within it.  Some communities require members to buy in, some have ways of letting people work their way in, rent or whatever.  A number of these communities are WWOOF hosts, and/or run volunteer working weekends, so you can go along and get a taste of what it is like to be a part of such a setup.

A couple within striking distance of Caversham are Braziers Park near Wallingford http://www.braziers.org.uk/ and Redfield in North Bucks (near Aylesbury) http://www.redfieldcommunity.org.uk/   Redfield is the home of LILI (the Low Impact Living Initiative), which also runs the WWOOF UK office.  They run a lot of courses there, many of which would be of interest to smallholders and wannabe smallholders. 

Another truly inspiring WWOOF host nearby to you, Cavendish, is Lower Shaw Farm in Swindon.  http://www.lowershawfarm.co.uk/  They also do working weekends; I went to one in May 2004 and it literally changed my life.  If you can't have your own smallholding yet, maybe helping out on an established one nearby (and no doubt coming home with a few bits and pieces of surplus produce from time to time) would help fill a void.  And would certainly equip you with experiences and techniques that would stand you in good stead when you do get your own place.

[Cavendish]

Thanks for the links Sallyintnorth, they will be interesting read, had a quick look and they look like things I can and should try my hand at.

 

[SallyintNorth]

Thanks for the links Sallyintnorth, they will be interesting read, had a quick look and they look like things I can and should try my hand at.

You are very welcome. 

Let us know how you get on if you do have a go!

[colliewoman]

Yet another way......
i upped sticks and ran away (literally) from my old life in normality and now live in a 2 room static on a field belonging to a friend.
then i fell in love with the time and space such basic living allows.
2 days a week working for the man earns my rent, food and animal feed, AND the rental of a 1 acre field along the way with goat proof fencing and a river. i have never been happier in my life! 
My husbands earnings can be saved to buy us our own land in a few years, so hopefully we can become self sufficient