Smallholding dreams

[forinborin]

Just a dreamy post.

Anyone else here developed an urge during the last couple of months to move away from the city into the countryside? Now that remote working seems to be with us long term, and the new normal.

Not farming full scale, just a couple of acres of land, poultry, a pig or two, a veg plot, an orchard... A better, and slower, quality of life overall, all while still earning a professional wage remotely.

Where would you move if so? Within the UK, or further away?

We have an equestrian property in Scotland, 45 acres of grazing and woodland. It's hard work, will never make us any money and I do get tired of being in shitty clothes and covered in mud and hair. However, my kids love it, where we live is very beautiful, my animals are so much happier then they ever were on a livery yard and I keep them how I want them. My vet has commented on how content my herd is becuase they live out 24/7 as naturually as possible, with very little stress in their lives. I love the quiet, I love going to bed at night knowing anti social behaviour will not disturb me and there is nothing better than just walking over to the end of the garden to give my pony a cuddle. Fencing is my bug bear, its really, really expensive and if you share fencing with someone else, you can gaurantee they will not go half on the costs of maintaing and repairing it. Other people are hell and you don't escape them completly on a smallholding. I have an overseas landlord next to who insists on renting her field to people with sheep, despite havign horse fecing up. So they consantly escape into what is supposed to be my haylage field. She doesn't give a damn that this is costing me money.

Just to add, we both work from home and I am part time, so have time for things like field maintenance and I am here for emergences with the animals. It is very hard otherwise. We don't have holidays and days out are rare. Life very much revolves around them.

@CMOTDibbler

My dad used to have a pretty good business teaching townies who'd had this sort of dream how to care for animals - usually called in by the vet when it was apparent that they hadn't trimmed their feet or done other basic cares. My parents had goats and chickens, and raised lambs/pigs/calves for meat on the excess milk plus grew or traded almost all their veg and fruit. Dad got up at 4 to milk, mum at 5 to process the milk and then water the greenhouses etc before work, dad having left at 6. In the evening there was milking, animal care, watering, weeding etc etc. And in all the many years they had the animals they had two nights away together, which required a complex exchange with another goat keeper. So, moving to remote working, perfect. Have some chickens in a nice coop (not an Omelet) with auto closer and they are lovely and low maintenance. Grow some veg. But don't have a smallholding.

Oh no, I am not a townie. I am quite used to animal care, as I said - grew up in condition where if you don't grow something, you don't eat (well, almost). So not too misty eyed about the rural idyll (have very little idea about the UK specifics though).

@ThursdayWeld I actually had to have this discussion with our council. Where we are it’s considered agricultural land unless stated otherwise which will only arise if someone has obtained change of use planning permission. So fine for growing food, keeping animals and constructing shelters as long as they are moveable.

We live in the Wiltshire countryside having lived in London/Reading for several years. We don't have a small holding but a decent side garden and I love it. It's sort of split into three areas around a central pond. One third is kept mown and is where we sit out to eat and do BBQ's, one third is only mown once a year and I'm planting wild flowers for wild life and the final third is fruit (raspberries, strawberries, blue berries and black currants) and vegetables (asparagus - just in this year - runner beans, peas, french beans and beetroot are my favourite veg to grow ie easiest IMO).

I love the idea of a small holding with chickens and pigs but know I'd hate cleaning them out and taking the piglets to slaughter would be heart breaking, so fruit and veg is a good size garden it is!

[quote Kathers92]@SarahAndQuack
Im not even very good at it but we enjoy trying all the same 😂[/quote]
I'm sure I could persuade DP to drink something if I gave it a go!

I'm definitely not cut out for a smallholding though. Inspired by this thread, I went out to wrestle with the veg patch. It is both hot and extremely humid today, and I've cleared about one square metre of ground for the courgettes and am shattered.

I grew up on a farm,had a few years away,now I'm back on it again,working alongside my other jobs.
I can't remember what it's like not to worry about,too much rain,not enough rain,poor straw/ hay harvests,vet bills ( if you can find a large animal vet now,a lot can't get the staff,so have stopped large animal services),TB testing, equipment breakdowns,ect.
You will never have a day off,unless you can pay someone else to cover for you. Working even part time and trying to get all the jobs done in the depth of winter when it's dark by 3.20pm is bad enough. I don't know how anyone could work away from home full time and pull everything in between October and March.
As a pp has mentioned,land doesn't look after itself,it requires,hedging,fencing,ditching,drainage,muck spreading. Animals require CPH numbers, passports,movement licences,drug records,there are regulations on where you can put your muck heaps and what you do with them. I have never worked in a business with so much red tape.
But it must appeal to a lot of people. 9 acres next to us went up for sale recently,offers over £110k. It's awful quality land,poorly hedged and fenced,it opens onto a hilly,unlit b road,so highways have refused any development whatsoever on there,not even stables. It sold though.
If you can hold off,wait until after winter,when all the people who bought during lock down find out just how hard it can be.

I only have an acre. I have chickens, an orchard, wildlife pond and a lovely garden and lots of veg beds (2 kids, dog, semi feral cat, husband). I did have a dream of getting some goats/or pigs - but for now that’s on ice, because it’s hard graft, I’m still learning and the animals are so tying. There’s always something that needs doing especially now with the veg. I start at 6:30 - finish at about 8 (I am not employed) with school runs, walking the dog and looking after kids in between, I can’t do serious work when the kids are around. I want to do a horticulture qual to try and make enough money to keep my garden ticking over - but I won’t make much, even the chickens don’t pay for themselves.

And I’m always covered in mud on the school run...although this afternoon I’m flouncing around in a summer dress after a very rare pub lunch - I have loads to do tomorrow!

It definitely wouldn't be a slower life. We've got 2 part time ponies and it takes up absolutely hours of my time. It's a struggle on top of work and I work term time and school hours only. Having chickens and vegetables on top would be like another full time job and is especially hard in winter with bad weather and limited daylight hours.

I have a full sized (250sqm) allotment plot and it’s really hard to keep on top of that as well as working full time - if you wanted anything more I think you would need to drop your working hours significantly.

I do live the dream but very often it becomes a nightmare! DH works FT and I play with sheep all day. It is a brilliant way of life, especially for my daughter but there are times when it is all consuming and you have to be on hand 24/7. We are lambing which is full on and whilst on the whole is a great time of year, it is frustrating, tiring and often upsetting. Once lambing has finished it's only a few weeks until we think about haymaking and worrying about the weather. To be honest I worry about the weather constantly! Will we have enough grass? Is it ever going to stop raining? Is it really going to snow in May?
I wouldn't tell you not to do it, but please remember reality is very different to the things you see on TV and it is bloody hard work!!!
I hope you get your dream but it won't be a slower pace of life!!

We have just moved into a house on 4-5 acres. We won't try and do self sufficiency, half of the garden is copse and we have a gardener, however like you we aren't going back to the office. DH and I both work for firms with more than 200,000 employees and they've both said we only need to be in the office 2 days a week. So we will be home at least 5 days a week. Today at lunch I went for a walk around the garden. Bliss. We will start a small veg patch but nothing more laborious. We used to have 2 allotments and it was more work than I want for now.

My boss does exactly this OP!It’s not cheap though and certainly takes a fair amount of effort

Do you know reading back through this I think a rural property with 0.5 to 1 acre plot would do you nicely OP- if it was 'garden' rather than 'paddock' and under a couple of acres that takes the price hike of it being suitable for ponies out of the equation but gives enough space for your purposes. Chickens in a good setup are quite easy and very enjoyable, and pottering in a veg patch, tending to fruit trees etc would fit into the time gained from not commuting and be something kids could help with as and when the whim takes them.

If you have an especially busy day you would still be able to find 10-15 mins to feed, water and check your chooks and it's generally easy to find someone to do holiday cover for them if you're not remote.
I wasn't joking earlier about four legged stuff being the hard but but I think you already knew that. If love to be able to get into bees but I can't. I just can't take to it despite several attempts at helping friends with theirs.

Your running costs on half a dozen chickens would be less than £50 a month as well I should say and bring far more pleasure that one evening spend in the babysitter!

[quote SarahAndQuack]@UtterlyUnimaginativeUsername, that sounds perfect (aside from the pigs!). We're in the process (fingers crossed) of buying a house with about 1/3 of an acre and one of the other people who wanted to buy it wanted to keep goats! She brought a goat-surveyor friend to assess whether it was a suitable space, too.

What fruit and nut trees do you have? I have tentatively just bought a crab apple and I have a morello cherry. I want to get a quince and a medlar and some eating apples.[/quote]
We have 5 apple (4 eaters and 1 bramley), 2 pear, 2 plum, 2 sweet cherry, 1 morello cherry, 1 quince, 2 hazelnut and 1 almond. Underneath, there's strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, sunberries, loganberries, gooseberries, blackcurrants, redcurrants, whitecurrants and rhubarb. I think that'll do

You don't need a great deal of land for a couple of young pigs; you need shade, a wallow, a draft proof house (straw bale is perfect) and soft soil they can root up. Nine months later you have a freezer full of meat

You can start small! We have a few chickens but next on my list is a goat. Already have a good veg patch and some apple trees. Chickens are easy and very low maintenance. Plus they are very funny to watch. I am a constant lurker on the greenshifters website, have you see it OP? Small holdings to rent or buy both in the U.K. and abroad. Some of the properties are amazing, have their own water source and bite holes etc. Totally off grid would be a dream.

Forget pigs, cows, sheep. Unless you are a farmer it won’t work well. The rest is doable. Working from home as a professional will pay to run the small holding. You will enjoy growing and keeping your own produce, but don’t expect to sell it. Grow just enough for your family and learn to rotate it. Life will be fuller, but it won’t be slower. If you remain working from home, you will sometimes be conflicted. After a week of rain and the soil starts to dry out enough to dig over, you may be bogged down at your desk tied to a report deadline. At the same time, itching to get out before the next wet spell tomorrow. It’s hard work, never perfect, but life is fuller as I say.

@Sarahlou63

You don't need a great deal of land for a couple of young pigs; you need shade, a wallow, a draft proof house (straw bale is perfect) and soft soil they can root up. Nine months later you have a freezer full of meat

And a trashed piece of ground 😂

Pigs are ace, they really are. But my god they make a bloody mess. I treat my breeding ones like horses most of the year, they go out in the paddock in the morning then back into the snuggly shed at night. When it's really hot they go out at night instead and when the weather's awful they stay in the barn and just go out for a leg stretch while I muck out. Doing it that way has been genuinely life changing. They're always ready to go out but equally always ready to come back in!

Ooh, I'm so tempted by pigs! I have an area under the trees up the back of the garden that's full of undergrowth they could clear out for me. I'm off to google fencing (again...).

@UtterlyUnimaginativeUsername - that sounds great! You'll need electric fencing (wire rather than tape), it's not expensive and the pigs quickly learn to respect it.

Personally I'd never ever rely on electric as my final boundary fence for any animals but especially pigs. Ok to section off within an area but in my experience a disaster waiting to happen if it's the only thing between pigs and something really tasty/interesting on the other side.