What would you do with 3 acres of land??

[Hotdamn]

Hi - this has just been offered to us to purchase right next to our house. It is affordable, it can't be developed for housing. Currently has a few trees and sheep. We live on the edge of a town and we have never had more than a small back garden before, we are proper townies. I'm excited at the prospect but... any advice on how to use the land / what to do with it?! We have 4 secondary sch aged children. Thanks!

Planning/land use permitting I reckon an orchard would be really nice.

@Lurchermom

Rent it out as secure dog fields (obviously make sure it is secure). They charge £10+p/h to hire around here!

You'd need public liability insurance and it can be fairly expensive. Also it would probably get quite muddy in the wet and there's thing to think about like disposal of dog waste, parking, noise concerns, what happens if someone has an accident, accounting... Not quite as simple as it seems.

I'd have a wind turbine and ground source heating for my house. Both expensive but need putting in before anything else. Once that's done probably plant it up with fruit and nut trees.

@Costacoffeeplease

I’d rent it out by the hour to dog owners who want a safe place to let their dogs off the lead, or for training/agility work

You would need totally secure fencing and a lot of insurance for that. It would be a major investment

I would just enjoy it. We are in the process of buying about 7 acres, partly to have space around us and no near neighbours and for dh's business, but mostly it's just for our own use and enjoyment. I'd plant an orchard too. If you want to make some money, you could let it out for horses or other animals, and whoever owns those sheep may have an interest in carrying on as a tenant.

Divide into plots and set up a community allotment so local people and schools have a place to grow veg
Let some of the land out for some one to run forest school
Keep goats and chickens

Place marking for ideas, already planned a wildflower meadow.

We have 6 acres. One acre is very wet with scrubby trees and is a "nature reserve", we have an area planted up with about 500 willow for coppicing for cuttings, willow weaving craft and living sculpture, we have about a mile of hedge banks as it is a historic strip field landscape and these have sloes and blackberries, sycamore to try and keep in check, hawthorn, ash (suffering die back) etc, some grape vines, a field of lavender, an orchard, vegetable gardens, poly tunnel etc, chicken run and about an acre of garden. We have open days a bit in summer for the lavender and biodiversity (not this year). Lots of work and planning, I am always behind.

Can you incorporate it into your garden. What’s the layout in relation to your house?

It's a triangle shape and we share a boundary with one of the long sides, which goes up along our drive and the garden and beyond, so it could be incorporated.

Assault course for your kids? Massive rope swings, Krypton Factor style?

Tennis court??

Buy it in a heartbeat. Glamping pods down the line, nice pond, wildflowers etc.

Create a wild woodland area. Grow veggies, keep poultry. Maybe add an off grid glamping pod/shepherds hut and generate an income. Grant's are available for forestry plantations but 3 acres is not really sufficient. Change of use planning may be required depending on current category.

If you want to make enough $$ to retire on and the lot is flat and adjacent to town then I'd investigate the process for rezoning and developing it personally. "It can't be developed for housing" is what some of the market sees. Developers see "It can be developed for housing one day, with a bit of work and a bit of savvy". Here's a tip: the trickier the rezoning process, the more profit there is to be made.

Buy miniature horses 🥰

I don't know the area but is there any possibility of a small open cast coal mine?

It could bring some useful money in, although I think these sort of mineral extraction rights belong to the Queen or her swans or something. (N.B. I'm not a lawyer)

@BiddyPop

I'd put in more trees to at least an acre - ones that are local to the area (deciduous not spruce I mean) and a lot of fruit trees. Put a few bird boxes in around the trees.

Plenty of veg growing space. Done properly to make it easy to use and rotate.

Beehives. And let the edges and spare areas become wild flower meadows.

And fence off part of it for pigs and some chickens/ducks etc.

I'd probably also try to get some green energy solutions going somewhere - solar panels or wind turbines - to run some things in the house, charge batteries, heat water, have light or heat as needed for animals etc.

Admittedly those plans require a lot of work to establish and then to maintain, but I would really love a smallholding.

This is the dream.

The whole reason why you usually need planning permission to turn agricultural land into anything else is to prevent the type of 'suburban encroach' that is being suggested by the vast majority of people on this thread.

The minute you start putting even small sheds/ hen houses/ greenhouses/ raised beds/ small turbines/ bee hives etc etc it starts changing the natural look and purpose of the land. It stops being permanent pasture and becomes 'garden' or allotment. Once that has happened it's a small step to it becoming housing.

Even if the aim is to use it as a small holding that requires physical structures, tracks, internal fencing, equipment and machinery. It changes the look. It's a drip drip reduction of green space.

@Scrowy permanent pasture is not a 'natural look' for land. It's an artificial habitat which is actually very damaging to local wildlife. Farming in this country has been in decline for a long time, hence land like this being sold off. There's no point in keeping it dormant when it could be repurposed in a way which promotes native wildlife and sustainable living.

Op, incorporate it into your garden, remove the boundary. Then decide what to do with it.

What has it got on it now? You say sheep and trees, is there grass? Or do you need to turn it to lawn to pretty it up in the mean time?

I get it’s huge, as said ours is the same size, but it was already a mature garden when we bought, and although logically I know it’s huge, in reality it no longer seems that way as we have spent over six years maintaining it, so we know every inch and have learned how to minimise the work.

The ride on is critical, a good one that mulches, half our garden had been left wild by the previous owners. With the wild grasses up to waist height, in reality that doesn’t work because it soon gets to a level where you can’t cut it back. We had it professionally cleared and then just kept on top of it with the lawn mower and now it’s all lawned, grass spreads amazingly quickly.

The second piece of critical equipment is a bush cutter, we do the borders with those, as the whole thing has borders with plants in and it is impossible to weed. So we use the bush cutter to get in and around the plants, and need to get some ground covering ones to prevent that work effort.

Thirdly get to know a good tree surgeon, we also have a lot of trees, and the tree surgeon is here annually, we also have our own chain saw, so we can do smaller ones when necessary ourselves.

We also have wood burners and are self sufficient in wood, and have two wood stores.

I think once you incorporate it, get used to it, and basically make it look a bit nicer if required, then you can take your time deciding what to do with it,

I’d also say it’s a learning curve. We had only ever had typical normal small gardens before and we really didn’t know what we were doing when we moved in, we did make an effort but after a couple of years it was beginning to get over grown and we were struggling to keep on top of it. I kept calling it the Jurassic garden because everything grew so fast,

Now we have learned and are on top of it, we learned what equipment we needed, we had the borders, banks and the wild area cleared for us, and then we kept on top of it, we took a load of small trees out that were very old and dying and got the root grinders in and lawned it, built six large raised veg beds, the compost heaps, the wood stores, put in new hedging etc,

Some of it was substantial heavy work, I can’t lie, things grow very fast indeed, areas the previous owners left at waist height were shoulder height within two years, the borders became a tangle of weeds, a lot of the mature plants and ornamental trees became over grown and entwined.

You learn, but there is no doubt there is a work effort involved in managing a piece of land this size, and a cost to be honest.

incorporate it into your garden, remove the boundary.

If it's a field with sheep in, surely it is likely to be agricultural land and can't just be incorporated into the garden.

Morning - thank you again, this is so interesting to read. We have never longed for more land so this is all very new to us. Some really helpful practical advice re planning, equipment etc means we have to think about further spending on top of the cost of the land to keep it maintained. It is mostly grass with a copse of trees at the front and another larger copse at the back. Hedges for boundaries at the back of the plot and a fence that separates the plot and more land on the adjacent side.

I have to say I never considered mining coal!

@Bluntness100

Op, incorporate it into your garden, remove the boundary. Then decide what to do with it.

What has it got on it now? You say sheep and trees, is there grass? Or do you need to turn it to lawn to pretty it up in the mean time?

I get it’s huge, as said ours is the same size, but it was already a mature garden when we bought, and although logically I know it’s huge, in reality it no longer seems that way as we have spent over six years maintaining it, so we know every inch and have learned how to minimise the work.

The ride on is critical, a good one that mulches, half our garden had been left wild by the previous owners. With the wild grasses up to waist height, in reality that doesn’t work because it soon gets to a level where you can’t cut it back. We had it professionally cleared and then just kept on top of it with the lawn mower and now it’s all lawned, grass spreads amazingly quickly.

The second piece of critical equipment is a bush cutter, we do the borders with those, as the whole thing has borders with plants in and it is impossible to weed. So we use the bush cutter to get in and around the plants, and need to get some ground covering ones to prevent that work effort.

Thirdly get to know a good tree surgeon, we also have a lot of trees, and the tree surgeon is here annually, we also have our own chain saw, so we can do smaller ones when necessary ourselves.

We also have wood burners and are self sufficient in wood, and have two wood stores.

I think once you incorporate it, get used to it, and basically make it look a bit nicer if required, then you can take your time deciding what to do with it,

Just to say that you need planning permission to incorporate agri land into a garden. But I dont think you need a change of use if you decide to grow veggies and graze alpacas etc. There's loads of info on Backyard Smallholder sites about this.