Self-Sufficiency in Style
finding a place
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Self-Sufficiency in Style finding a place
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Where do we find the right place?
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Well you have to start by deciding just what it is you want to do? |
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If you are going to keep animals you will need to decide roughly how many of each. This will tell you how much land you will need. |
Are you going to keep animals? Not cats and dogs, they can go almost anywhere, but farm animals:
Pigs, Poultry, Sheep and Cattle. |
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Are you going to produce your own vegetables?
fruit? hay? fuel? |
Vegetable
and fruit production will also take land.
Grass left to produce hay will enable you to feed cattle and sheep through the winter from your own resources. A wood supply from your own trees means that you heat the house cheaply. |
| As a generalisation, the South Eastern
corner of the island of Britain (and incidentally the South East of
Ireland) offer the widest possibilities, with the flatter, better soils
and the dryer and sunnier climates.
It gets tougher in both islands as you move north and west. Colder and wetter, often mountainous with poorer soils, you need more land to produce a narrower range of foodstuffs. There are, however, exceptions with small areas untypical in both climate and land. Compensation for difficult farming conditions comes in cheaper prices for land and houses. |
The nature of the land matters too; it's topography, height, climate and soil. These things determine not only what you can do, but how much land you will need. There is no such thing as perfect land in a perfect climate.
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How much land do we need?
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On the flatter lowland areas with average soil conditions and the sunnier
climate, you will need about 5 acres to become substantially
self-sufficient in port, beef, lamb and poultry meat, dairy products,
temperate vegetables and fruit.
In poorer areas you may need up to 20 acres to produce the same. The range of fruit, in particular, will be narrower. If you don't keep farm animals, you will need about an acre of good, or improvable, preferably flat soil anywhere. |
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The House, the Outbuildings and the Locality. If you only have enough money for a very small place Small Garden Self-Sufficiency might cheer you up. You do need to make sure that the property is unlikely to be flooded, Floods! may help.
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What else do we need to consider? |
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"caring for the land" from the weirdly named Hangman's Cottage, just to the south of Misery Corner. |
