37 How Much Land Do You Really Need to Homestead?

Do you really need 20 acres to build a productive homestead?

In this episode of Handmade Happiness, Jessica and Thomas explore one of the most common questions aspiring homesteaders ask: How much land do you actually need to grow food for your family?

After a year on our own 5 acre Missouri homestead, we're sharing what we've learned about matching your property to your goals, why bigger isn't always better, and how thoughtful planning can make even a small backyard incredibly productive.

Whether you live on a suburban lot, dream of owning a few acres, or are considering a larger farm, this episode will help you think beyond acreage and focus on creating a homestead that truly fits your family's lifestyle.

In this episode, we discuss:

🌱 How much land it really takes to grow food for your family

🌱 What you can accomplish on a small backyard lot

🌱 The advantages and challenges of a 5-acre homestead

🌱 The realities of owning 20+ acres of land

🌱 Why productive gardening is about planning not just property size

🌱 Growing vegetables, fruit trees, berries, herbs, and perennial crops in limited space

🌱 Choosing livestock that fits your property and lifestyle

🌱 Designing a homestead that serves your family instead of becoming overwhelming

🌱 Why stewardship matters more than acreage

If you've been waiting to start because you think you don't have enough land, we hope this conversation encourages you to begin where you are and make the most of what you've been given.

🌿 Visit The Lark Life for gardening resources, quilting classes, recipes, homesteading inspiration, and practical skills for the whole family.

Subscribe for more conversations about gardening, homesteading, cooking from scratch, homeschooling, handmade skills, and intentional living.

✨ Thanks for tuning in to Handmade Happiness! ✨
If you enjoyed today’s episode, please subscribe so you don’t miss future conversations about slowing down, creating with your hands, and living more intentionally.

💌 Stay connected:

• Visit me at TheLarkLife.com
• Follow along on Instagram: @The_Lark_Life
• Click to join my email list for updates, resources, and encouragement

🧵 Share the love:
 If this episode encouraged you, would you take a moment to leave a review or share it with a friend? It truly helps others discover the show.

You can also support the show by making a donation at www.thelarklife.com/podcast

Until next time, may you find joy in the simple things and beauty in the work of your hands.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hi there, welcome to the Handmade Happiness Podcast. I'm Jessica.

SPEAKER_00 0:03

And I'm Thomas.

SPEAKER_01 0:04

And welcome in. It's been another busy day. I feel like we do that every time. Always a busy day around here.

SPEAKER_00 0:12

I didn't get my hair cut today.

SPEAKER_01 0:13

Part of what we'll talk about in our episode today. But before we get into our episode, just talk about a few of the things that we have been up to today.

SPEAKER_00 0:21

Status update.

SPEAKER_01 0:22

Yeah, so um I was shooting a video today. You can go check it out on our YouTube channel, just kind of showing people the garden. I harvested the rest of our root vegetables. Well, the ones that were up in the front. Carrots. I harvested like the rest of the carrots, radishes, beets. Um, because I need that space for green beans. It's time to put some other things. I pulled out the old snow peas, um, letting those finish drying out so we can save those seeds to replant in the fall. Um, we're about ready to. I've got so many bok choy seeds out there that I'm gonna be saving. And then I trellised up the cucumbers and tomatoes are going crazy.

SPEAKER_00 1:06

I'm excited. The tomatoes look fabulous. I mean, it is the season now.

SPEAKER_01 1:10

They're loaded with fruit and they're getting heavy, and they're growing faster than I can. Like, I walk out there every day, and still tonight I was out there and I was like, oh my gosh, how did it grow that much that I need there's like two feet of plant that's not trellis, that's not like attached to the anyways. So I worked on that and pulled out some stuff in the back, but I made an observation today that I just thought I would share with you. Um, so we have some onions in the back that are being overgrown by grass just because of the ones you showed me, they were gorgeous. Yeah, beautiful onions.

SPEAKER_00 1:47

Beautiful onions.

SPEAKER_01 1:47

Um, I went ahead and pulled a few of the big ones where some of the necks were starting to flop over. Like you're really supposed to wait until they're all flopped over and kind of yellow.

unknown 1:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:58

Um and the first couple that I pulled, like I didn't even have to pull, they just let right go. Like the roots had already let go. They were they were done. Um, and then I went to the next one right beside it, but it hadn't quite flopped over yet. And I like broke the top of the onion trying to get out of the ground.

SPEAKER_02 2:17

Really?

SPEAKER_01 2:18

So I'm like, hmm, maybe if I go and tug on the onion and it doesn't readily come out of the ground, it's not ready yet, and I should just leave it alone. So next time I won't pull so hard to break the tops off. Anyways, a few were ready, so I brought them in. We've got some potatoes we brought in.

SPEAKER_00 2:33

Anyways, beautiful onions.

SPEAKER_01 2:34

We've got some amazing stuff that we're eating. So y'all go to our YouTube video and check out yes, check out the garden. Um and you did something very exciting today, too.

SPEAKER_00 2:44

I did, but before I get to that, okay, I wanted to ask you a question. The other day, you brought home a ginormous onion.

SPEAKER_01 2:49

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 2:50

And we made it into onion rings.

SPEAKER_01 2:52

Oh my goodness. I'm gonna grow these onions. They're my favorite.

SPEAKER_00 2:55

It was the sweetest, mildest onion. And at first, when she cut it, it made these big rings and they were kind of thick, and I don't really like thick onion rings, right? But when they fried, they they the moisture came out real quickly and they kind of shrank a little bit. They were tender and sweet and mild, like it was the most phenomenal thing.

SPEAKER_01 3:13

So it's a it's a walla walla onion.

SPEAKER_00 3:16

Walla walla onion. It's huge.

SPEAKER_01 3:17

It's like six to eight inches thick. It's a cantaloupe size almost.

SPEAKER_00 3:20

It's humongous. And it was the best tasting highly recommend, especially again for like onion rings or if you're gonna eat it like raw. I don't really appreciate just a real mouthful of raw onion. I know some people do.

SPEAKER_01 3:33

This was not even pungent. It was so mild, so sweet.

SPEAKER_00 3:37

And so there's like a hundred things that we would use it for because it's not just like a kick in the mouth, like you know, raw, fresh yellow onion or something is kind of sharp.

SPEAKER_01 3:47

Giant and delicious, and I really hope that they have them again at the farmer's market tomorrow. Yeah, we're gonna buy some more. I'm planning to buy some more, and it's on my list, so when I'm getting all of my starts for next year, we are planting a bunch. Oh, yeah, because we'll use those for everything. Phenomenal walla walla onions. If you haven't had them, you should look for them.

SPEAKER_00 4:05

Yeah, so back to what I did today.

SPEAKER_01 4:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:07

Um, so we've had two uh pork bellies curing in the fridge outside for about a week. And we finally smoked them off today. We've made bacon before, which is why we did two instead of one this time.

SPEAKER_01 4:20

Because we realized one is so good.

SPEAKER_00 4:22

Um and it's phenomenal. It came out really good. Uh, I cooked ours to about 140, so you would not eat it as is, right? You need to continue cooking it.

SPEAKER_02 4:30

Right.

SPEAKER_00 4:31

Um, but that's kind of a sweet spot where you you get some of the qualities of that longer cook, the meat consistency changes a little bit, um, but you're not cooking it all the way out basically to 150. So anyway, uh it came out phenomenal. Nice smoke on it. We yeah, I think we just used some hickory chips that we had, and uh so I'm excited. And again, if it comes out anything like last time, we just sliced it. So the advantage to doing your own bacon, if you're saying, well, I can buy bacon at the store, right? You have two options when you go to the store. You can buy the five to six dollar a pound really crappy Walmart brand bacon. It's really thin like lunch meat, and it's mostly fat, and it disappears when you cook it. Um, or you can pay like $10 a pound and you can buy $12 or $14, yeah. And you can buy like the thick cut right brand bacon that's much more substantial bacon. But the problem is you pay like $12 a pound. We paid $4 a pound for the pork bellies at Costco, I think.

SPEAKER_01 5:26

Yeah, I think it was a little less than a power.

SPEAKER_00 5:27

Um maybe a little less, $3.89, something like that. So my price per pound, including the work and the seasonings and stuff, is really at or below the cheap bargain basement bacon, but the quality of what we're getting is phenomenal at least like high-end bacon, right? And because when they sell you a pork belly, the pork bellies that they sell you tend to be more meaty because they don't want you to be buying a bunch of fat, right? They're trying to get a better product to you. So the fatty ones get turned into bacon, the meatier ones get sold. So I'm buying higher quality pork belly and turning it into cheap bacon that has the quality of high-end bacon. So I highly suggest you do it. It's not hard.

SPEAKER_01 6:09

Cut it to the thickness.

SPEAKER_00 6:12

We vacuum seal up little packages and yeah, we just slice it all, we'll kind of chill it down real good until it firms up and then slice all of it and bag it about a five year old.

SPEAKER_01 6:19

Play with the recipe a little bit to you know adjust the flavor. I adjusted the sugar down a little bit this time just to see how last time we made it was pretty sweet.

SPEAKER_00 6:26

And again, it was phenomenal, but not like for breakfast purposes and stuff. I don't like a real sweet bacon. Now, again, on a burger, it's you know it'd be fantastic. But um, and again, you can package it half pound or pound, depending on you the size of your family or how much bacon you like.

SPEAKER_01 6:42

But so needless to I'm I'm pretty excited about breakfast tomorrow. Yes. So that brings us to our conversation for this episode. So I've heard some different people talking about it recently, and I realized like what they were saying rang really true with me and our experience this past year. Um, so we're gonna be talking about how much space you really need to grow food for your family. How much land do you need? What we thought before we moved here a year ago, we came just from our suburban neighborhood. Uh, what we were looking for, what we ended up with, and now that we've been here a year, like what our thoughts are on how much space you really need to grow food for your family. So um, I guess let's start like before we came here, we had some kind of specific things that we were looking for. Um and we were looking for something with much more acreage than we ended up with.

SPEAKER_00 7:42

Yeah. Well, and in fairness, I think we had a fairly accurate view of what we wanted that to look like, right? Um, but land is cost prohibitive. I mean, let's be honest, land is not cheap. And a lot of people, I think, like us included, you end up with this balancing act of like, how nice is the house going to be versus how many acres am I gonna have, right?

SPEAKER_01 8:04

Well, and for us, a big key factor was how far away from civilization do I want to be? Like, we could have gotten a property on, we looked at property.

SPEAKER_00 8:12

We could have gotten four times the property that we have, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:14

40 acres even. Um, but we would have been a couple hours from the airport in the middle of nowhere, been at least an hour from India. In a town with a population of less than a hundred people, like with our kids and trying to connect and build community.

SPEAKER_00 8:29

If you want a choice of grocery store, church, you know, what you do on Friday nights, you need to be a little closer to town than that.

SPEAKER_01 8:36

So we opted instead of the 20 or 40 plus acre properties that we had kind of dreamed of, yeah. Um, we found this place closer to super close to town.

SPEAKER_00 8:50

15 from the airport, five from Walmart.

SPEAKER_01 8:51

Feel like we're in the middle of nowhere. Quiet road, not a lot of traffic. So we feel like we're in the middle of nowhere, but super close to everything that we want to get to.

SPEAKER_00 9:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:01

Um, only five acres.

SPEAKER_00 9:04

Yeah. Um and you say only five.

SPEAKER_01 9:08

Um well, when we bought it, I was like, oh. And now that we've been here a year, I'm like, thank God we don't have 20 acres. Because what never really, I mean, I guess it was kind of in the back of our minds, but we didn't have a full grasp or understanding of it because we had never lived it yet, was how much time it takes to actually manage five acres.

SPEAKER_00 9:35

I work, I work full-time, right? And so, and I don't have a ten thousand dollar or an up tractor.

SPEAKER_02 9:42

Right.

SPEAKER_00 9:43

So for us, even the five acres that we have, like currently, our house and garden, our house and yard and you know, infrastructure are on a half an acre or so. We have a pond that's about a half an acre or so. So we're really only even working four acres. And even and even that, we're not working four acres. We're right right now, until we have larger animals, and we'll get into that in a minute.

SPEAKER_01 10:08

But no, we have acres of pasture that's just grown up. Because we don't have yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:16

And and so I guess that's the point is that we had a lot of ideas about stuff that we would do, but the reality of tending and I guess like husbanding that much property stewarding the space well. If you're if you work full-time, uh like I mean, she's at home, but she's works from home, she works more than full-time. So if you don't have somebody whose full-time job is to work that land, five acres is more than enough. Oh, yeah, more than enough. Because even if we had all the animals that we've talked about to be on that some of that land, taking care of them is additional chest. And um, even like right now, we're content to have our neighbor Ted come and hay three or acres of it or so because uh it just keeps it managed for us.

SPEAKER_01 11:00

Right. Without us having to purchase uh an expensive tractor and all of the right.

SPEAKER_00 11:06

And again, we have we have purpose for that. We're gonna get a cow and a pig and a sheep and those kind of things. But um, until we have some of that in place, it would be a huge undertaking if we were trying to plant row crops and we've talked about like that, you know, well and to and to keep it not just not letting it go wild.

SPEAKER_01 11:25

Like what we're if you were here at our property and you could see it at this time of year, the pastures have been growing since spring hit. Oh, yeah. Um, there it hasn't been it hasn't been hayed yet because we've had so much rain, nothing has dried out enough for them to come in hay. They planted to hay a few weeks ago, but they just if they haven't been out. So all of our pastures are at least chest high.

SPEAKER_00 11:48

At least, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:49

Some places are higher than that, and so we just kind of let that be, which is kind of problematic because in our area there's lots of ticks, and so we have to keep the dogs snakes and we have to keep the dogs in the coyotes can hide really well because um they just come in covered in ticks and all the other things that are out there. Um so yeah, it's it's a lot, and if I were to try to manage that myself with our current equipment, I would be out there pretty much every night.

SPEAKER_00 12:24

Yeah, because you wouldn't have an animal lawnmower helping you out all the time.

SPEAKER_01 12:28

Right.

SPEAKER_00 12:28

And that's I think the the point, kind of what we're talking about today, is that if you're wanting to get into, for lack of a better term, homesteading or whatever it is you want to call it, right?

SPEAKER_01 12:38

Right. Um if you just have a desire to grow more of your own food because you know that the food at the store is making you sick.

SPEAKER_00 12:45

Yeah. Like you can do you can feed a family our size in a quarter acre yard. Um, and this is something I told you I wanted to make sure and mention today. If you will let go of your lawn, oh yeah, right, let go of this idea that your yard is this smooth grass place where you pretend like you go out and play croquet or something, um, that's a holdover from like colonial British, like that was like a flex for people to have grass. And it's just I own this much land and I don't need it for anything except a lawn, right? You don't need a lawn. You need a bunch of raised beds. Right. Right. And so again, if you're on a quarter acre, you have a backyard to speak of, you can grow enough food in there to feed you.

SPEAKER_01 13:31

When if you think of it more as a cottage garden, like an English cottage garden where you've got your flowers and your herbs and your veggies and everything's just your fruit trees and everything is just kind of growing all together, and you can make it still be beautiful in all of its wildness at the heat of summer.

SPEAKER_00 13:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:48

Um, but it be productive.

SPEAKER_00 13:50

It's productive, exactly. Grass does nothing for anyone.

SPEAKER_01 13:53

Except for cows.

SPEAKER_00 13:54

Except for cows. And so if you're letting cows eat your lawn, it's not going to look like a lawn.

SPEAKER_01 13:58

Right.

SPEAKER_00 13:58

Right. And so again, let go of that idea of I need a lawn.

SPEAKER_02 14:02

Right.

SPEAKER_00 14:02

Uh, unless you're in an HOA, in which case I feel bad for you. But um once you get past that, then you start seeing the opportunities like, hey, I can put beans over here and I can trellis tomatoes over here, and all of a sudden you have a lot of space for garden. And then once you get past that, right? Like once you're out of like a suburban yard size, like quarter acre, half figure.

SPEAKER_01 14:25

Well, so let's stop for a second. Oh, you want back up? So you can grow a lot in a little space.

SPEAKER_00 14:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:31

And more land doesn't mean more food. So if like going back to some of the small suburban spaces we lived in, we could have given up more of the lawn. Oh, yeah. And we could have had enough raised beds to raise most of the produce that we were eating. Um, we have always planted fruit trees, even in those suburban yards. We like the trees and the berries. So we've always done those things. Um, but even in those small spaces, you and we've had chickens. Yeah, I was gonna say in Missouri. I mean, in Mississippi, we had even in a small suburban lot, you can have chickens that are giving you eggs. And rabbits. You can have rabbits that they take up so little space, they grow so quickly, they reproduce so quickly. So you could have your own source of meat in your backyard, and you could have raised beds filling your your yard front and back instead of a lawn. And just right there, even on a tiny suburban lot in a subdivision, you could be growing a whole lot of your food.

SPEAKER_00 15:35

Yeah, the majority of your food.

SPEAKER_01 15:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:37

The the other thing, and we haven't even talked about like vertical gardening and some of those other things. I mean, some people grow, you can grow plants inside your apartment on a high rise in New York, right? Some grow lights, some shelves, you got a window somewhere, park that sucker next to the window. You can grow food. Um but the question is, what does that look like, right? That what the way that you do that and what that looks like may have to change to accommodate that, right?

SPEAKER_01 16:06

Um and now that we're here, I feel like this five acres that we landed on really is kind of a lot of things. It's a pretty good chance because we have plenty of space for all of the fruit trees, all of the berries, all of the perennial things like the asparagus and stuff that I'm trying to grow. We have plenty of space for gardens, for fresh produce and herbs. We have ample space for not only the chickens and rabbits.

SPEAKER_00 16:35

I was gonna say we literally had over a hundred birds at any given time.

SPEAKER_01 16:39

We also have space to add the pig and a few sheep and a beef. Now we probably don't have enough space to have multiple cows. Um, like I probably couldn't have a beef and a dairy cow and sheep and the pig. Like eventually we would start taxing our land too much.

SPEAKER_00 17:01

But honestly, for where we are, you can't be rotational.

SPEAKER_01 17:05

We can, in the space that we have, if we manage it well, we can pretty much do all of the things that we want to do.

SPEAKER_00 17:12

Well, and what you just listed there, I mean, like you said, we we have enough land, and the cows is one of those things that we can't really speak on it yet because we haven't done it yet, right? Like, according to some sources, we should have plenty of land to do a beef and a dairy, right? Other people are like, uh, maybe not, maybe one. So we'll see, right? We'll find out.

SPEAKER_01 17:31

Well, and we might be able to have them both. But we probably wouldn't be able to have them both and be able to cut enough hay for the winter. Like we'd be buying right.

SPEAKER_00 17:40

There would be a comp compromised summer.

SPEAKER_01 17:42

For us, if we needed to buy hay, all of the fields around us also get cut.

SPEAKER_00 17:47

And it's just we can sold.

SPEAKER_01 17:48

We know the guy's selling the hay, it's not expensive, and because he's not having to haul it anywhere, it's literally right here.

SPEAKER_00 17:54

Yeah, so just so you know, we paid $30 per round bale for the hay that they cut on our property. I said, How much would you charge me to just leave one? And he was like, 30 bucks, I'll leave you a bale. So that's a great deal. We had two bales over the over the winter for bedding, food, and everything for the the all the small animals and birds, right? We didn't use a bale, we didn't use half a bale.

SPEAKER_02 18:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:20

And so, and that's including the rabbits and all that stuff. So, again, even adding a large animal into that equation, we would be fine, right?

SPEAKER_02 18:27

Right.

SPEAKER_00 18:28

Um, and so again, if I had to buy a round bale, 50 bucks maybe if they have to bring it from someone else's field next to me, because they literally could roll it over the fence, right? Um, and so there are some trade-offs there that are that would be easy for us to make.

SPEAKER_01 18:44

Right.

SPEAKER_00 18:45

Right. So, yes, okay, we're not gonna cut our own hay, but also we can have a whole beef, like that's a no-brainer.

SPEAKER_01 18:51

Oh yeah, oh yeah. Um, really the only advantage if we were to size up and have more than this five acres would be that we could have more head of cattle or more sheep, or you know, we could we could increase the livestock, we also could increase like wild wooded area that we intentionally left wooded and wild.

SPEAKER_00 19:17

And we've talked about that. That I think that's probably what we would end up doing because we've talked, we don't want to be cattle farmers. No, um, but what would be nice is having again 15-20 acres of more or less wild woods behind our house where we could uh have space to hunt. Um you have to be able to do that.

SPEAKER_01 19:36

Well, and if you could do a whole timber out of there, if you could have like some of the native nut trees and things, or you could go and forage for food that's just growing out there for free that you don't have to tend to.

SPEAKER_00 19:51

Yeah, and so again, it would not be farmed in the sense of like us super managing and and working it per se.

SPEAKER_02 20:00

Right.

SPEAKER_00 20:01

It would it would be tended, right? We might cut some gator trails through there or clear some underbrush, make some kind of like silvo pasture kind of space.

SPEAKER_02 20:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:11

Um, but it would it would require much less work from us than anything we're doing now.

SPEAKER_02 20:17

Right.

SPEAKER_00 20:17

And it would be more for like natural provision, like you said, foraging and things like that.

unknown 20:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:22

And just for exploring.

SPEAKER_01 20:24

Right.

SPEAKER_00 20:24

Just to have woods.

SPEAKER_01 20:25

It's just for the kids to run around. Um so all of that to say, I think my perspective has changed a lot in the last year of us being here. Um, really, even just in the last few months gardening um in this experimental garden year.

SPEAKER_00 20:47

Yeah, we're learning.

SPEAKER_01 20:48

Um so something that is kind of different that we experienced this when we lived in South Mississippi, but I forgot about it because we've been in South Texas for so long. So when we were in South Texas, um the summers were so hot and so dry that we didn't really have to cut the grass very often because it was just fighting to survive.

SPEAKER_00 21:14

It was barely alive, right?

SPEAKER_01 21:16

Yeah, um, I forgot that grass grows like the wildfire, yeah. Grass grows like crazy in the summer because it's warm and it's wet. And so I highly underestimated um the vigor of our grass.

SPEAKER_02 21:32

Yeah, and it grows great.

SPEAKER_01 21:33

Not just for the yard. Like honestly, I I cut the yard, and a few days later I'm like, oh my goodness, it doesn't even look like it's been cut. It looks like it needs to be cut again. But specifically in that garden area, the in-ground garden in the back, where we tilled things up and we the places where we have the weed barrier.

SPEAKER_00 21:53

You thought you had killed the grass? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:57

We put weed barrier down and the where the plastic weed. Barrier is is fine. We have another area where we put some paper and heavy wood mulch. And that's doing okay.

SPEAKER_00 22:09

It's better, but it's not, it's hardly grassy.

SPEAKER_01 22:11

We have another area where we just tilt it and threw some wood chips down. And you can't even tell that we put wood chips down because it's just all overtaken by grass. So definitely considering what that's gonna look like. Like as we start pulling things out and reclaiming that space as garden space, um, I'm not gonna underestimate the grass's potential. The other thing is our raised beds. I am constantly pulling grass out of our raised beds. And I cut that down to nothing before we put those beds in. I put we burned it and covered it, I put cardboard down, I put wood chips, then we put our compost in our soil, and we put more wood chips on top, and still the grass is just it's constant, it's so vigorous.

SPEAKER_00 23:04

And so and some of that gets better, right, uh every year as you're working and you're reducing and reducing and reducing the the weed load, right, just in the soil. Um that does get a little easier, but it's something to be aware of that like this is a battle you're gonna fight. And that depends where you're gonna be.

SPEAKER_01 23:23

I've heard multiple people talking about their gardens and what they have discovered. Well, a lot of them are downsizing gardens because they find they can be more productive in a smaller garden because it's less to read, it's less to feed, less to compost, less to keep your eyes on and manage. And so the things in there do significantly better because you're not spreading your resources so thin.

SPEAKER_00 23:54

Yeah. Um again, that's that's does that mean I'm gonna shrink our garden?

SPEAKER_01 23:58

Probably not.

SPEAKER_00 24:00

It does not mean that. I already know that. It does not mean that.

SPEAKER_01 24:02

But but I am like, okay, what how can I make this more manageable? And knowing that we can grow a lot of the food that I'm trying to grow in a small space.

SPEAKER_00 24:14

Yeah. Well, and and like you said, it's about efficiency, right? Um, would we make more garden space next year? Probably not a significant amount. Um, just because I don't know that we need more space. We're growing a lot of things that we want to grow. The other thing is next year, some of the varieties that we grew this year, we're not gonna grow up.

SPEAKER_01 24:34

We're not gonna grow again. Right.

SPEAKER_00 24:35

And so we will still have some experimental crops, right? Some new things. Uh we'll bring in the walla wallas, the onions, and things like that. But we'll we'll have a better grasp of like how much we need of each thing.

SPEAKER_01 24:47

Those things that we know are our favorites that do well here in this climate.

SPEAKER_00 24:52

And we've already seen that even with the squash and things like that. So we'll grow more of the things that do well that we want and that we like, and less experimental things that we don't. Um, that will help, right? Because it helps you be more intentional about how that space is getting used.

SPEAKER_01 25:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:06

The weed load starts to come down again after constantly. As we're managing it, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:10

I mean, it's been wild and unmanaged for years.

SPEAKER_00 25:13

For years and years. You don't know how many years.

SPEAKER_01 25:15

So it's gonna take time.

SPEAKER_00 25:16

Yeah. But but we're getting as we get better at it and as we get more focused, it becomes more manageable and it becomes less work, which then allows you to expand. So the point being, start small, right? Start with something that you absolutely can keep an absolute handle on, yeah, and you'll have a much better result than if you try to go out and sow you know an acre of corn in a field you've never worked before. And I guess you're gonna have a hard time.

SPEAKER_01 25:44

For me, the other thing is I I remember having that suburban yard with small raised beds and watching other people who had these big, dreamy gardens and just thinking like, oh, I wish and one day. And honestly, now I'm looking back and I'm like, why didn't I just put in more raised beds? Like it wouldn't have been a big deal. We could have done it and had more food. So if you're sitting back watching the rest of the world this garden season, and all of the Instagram channels and YouTubers that are showing you their dreamy perfect gardens, and you're thinking, man, I wish I just had the space to do that. Stop looking at that and take a second to like evaluate what you have and where can you put a raised bed or a container or something that you can do? Or green stall food.

SPEAKER_00 26:35

Right, you can grow a bunch of food vertically. Um, and you you can help me remember what the name of the YouTube channel is, but there are several YouTube channels where people talk about how much they're growing in their space. The one girl we were looking watching the other day, she's making six figures and feeding her large family.

SPEAKER_01 26:53

Whispering willow farms. You need to look up Whispering Whispering Willow Farms. She is not on a very big lot. So she actually lives in the house that Jess from Roots and Refuge, Jess and Maya used to live in that house, and that's the house they sold when they moved to Carolina.

SPEAKER_00 27:10

Okay, that makes sense.

SPEAKER_01 27:11

So she's at their house, but they have massive amounts of gardens, and it's not not she's producing a ton of food.

SPEAKER_00 27:20

A humon literally tons of food.

SPEAKER_01 27:22

A lot of hers is the strategies that she implements with succession. Rotations and succession. She knows, she has learned over the years how long it takes to grow these things, what to plant, when to start the next one, so that she's got a constant stream of food coming in for the entire growing season. Um, they do have like a greenhouse or high tunnel space so that she can start sooner and end later, but ultimately she doesn't have a giant space.

SPEAKER_00 27:52

No the other thing that she's done well is she's found alternate ways to generate revenue with her space. Uh I know she talks about having people come in because they grow flowers and people come in and do photo shoots in their flowers that they're growing. So she's getting paid there as well. So again, a lot of that just comes down to creativity. Like, how do you want to use that space? If you don't want anybody on your land, that's great, but you're not going to get paid $800 for a photo shoot from a photographer, right?

SPEAKER_02 28:21

Right.

SPEAKER_00 28:21

Um, if you don't want to grow green stalks, you want everything in the ground, no raised beds, that's great. You're gonna fight harder with the land. That's fine. Again, if that's what you choose, that works for you.

SPEAKER_01 28:31

But well, and when you hear her talk about what she is growing, yeah, she has selected a very specific like successful things, yes. These are the cucumbers I grow. And I grow these cucumbers because they are the most productive cucumbers that I have ever for my space. They work here, they produce double or triple what the other varieties produce for me. Um, so she's got her tried and trues that through trial and error, she's figured out what works, and that's what she keeps planting. And so that's what we're like fine-tuning is okay, moving towards what does really well here for us, what struggled here, is there another variety that we can grow? The other thing is she she mentioned the other day, and I was like, ooh, that I don't know if I could do that. She doesn't grow any kind of squashes at all.

SPEAKER_02 29:24

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 29:25

Because where they are, the pressure from all of the pests that come with squashes.

SPEAKER_00 29:30

We got a lot of squash buds, right? I know several people in that region have mentioned that.

SPEAKER_01 29:34

Um, and so she's like, I can just go and get a bushel of squash from a local farmer um and then not have any of that on my property. Well, and that's like the trade-offs that we talked about.

SPEAKER_00 29:49

Yeah, that's the trade-off that we talked about earlier. Again, for us, it doesn't make sense for me to leave my land wild and have grow hay grow. Like I could get hay for nothing, for dirt cheap. Um, I could trade literally a duck or two for a whole bunch of really expensive. Beef is $20 a pound for stake. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 30:09

That was eating our free pasture. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 30:12

Find your win, right? Yeah. Why would I conserve $100 worth of hay pasture when I could have literally $3,000 worth of beef on the hoof, right? So it doesn't make sense.

SPEAKER_01 30:24

That brings me to kind of maybe my last my last point to kind of wrap up some stuff. There's this idea of being self-sufficient, right? And so a lot of people are maybe they think that they need that 20 acres or that 40 acres because they want to grow all of their animals.

SPEAKER_00 30:43

All the feed for the animals, yeah, or what grow crops, wheat and corn. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 30:46

Right. I I can buy a 50-pound sack of wheat for 28 bucks for super cheap. And so I'm not gonna plant wheat, I'm gonna just buy the sack of wheat, and that's what we're gonna use. I can go down and get chicken feed for pretty inexpensively, and the eggs, the extra eggs that we produce.

SPEAKER_00 31:05

More than pays for that.

SPEAKER_01 31:07

I'm selling those eggs, I've got a good place to sell those eggs every week, and so that pays for the feed.

SPEAKER_00 31:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 31:13

Um if I had to choose between the dairy cow and the meat, the beef.

SPEAKER_00 31:18

Oh, for sure.

SPEAKER_01 31:20

We have found an amazing local dairy where we can get fresh raw milk for five dollars.

SPEAKER_00 31:26

And we don't have to milk a cow. Um, I don't have to milk a cow.

SPEAKER_01 31:29

And dairy cows are they go through the grass. They are hard on the pasture.

SPEAKER_00 31:34

They consume pasture.

SPEAKER_01 31:35

Where a beef is not, and again, I can get the milk, we don't use very much of it, and I can get it pretty inexpensively. Beef is pricey, beef is expensive. So it makes much more sense for me to grow beef on the pasture that we do have and buy milk from the local farmer.

SPEAKER_02 31:51

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 31:52

Um, so lean on local people. We can we have all the Amish farms around us, so I can get bushels of green beans and things if if I don't have enough to can and put away the things that I want to. If basically all the green beans that come out of the garden were eating fresh and I have to buy bushels from the Amish farm, um well, so it's fine.

SPEAKER_00 32:16

Case in point. Our blueberry bushes got really heavily nibbled by deer over the winter. That was not something we were prepared for. Deer and rabbits. They are growing. They also nibbled your green beans. The strawberries are first-year plants, so we didn't have a huge production, but we have a phenomenal U-pick right down the road from us. When I tell you we picked a hundred pounds plus of berries this year, I'm not kidding. We picked over a hundred pounds of strawberries, blueberries, and blackberries, and probably would have picked more because we're just those kind of people. But the point is, we're not able yet.

SPEAKER_01 32:50

Right.

SPEAKER_00 32:51

We're not there yet. Our plants are not mature enough to provide that level of berry produce, but we have a great source for them. Their prices are very reasonable. Yeah. It helps out our neighbors. Oh, yeah. So again, find the winds, right? What works for you. If you grow the world's best green beans in your soil for whatever reason, and you just have our prolific green bean producer, then grow green beans.

SPEAKER_02 33:12

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:13

And then swap those to your neighbor for a couple of gallons of raw milk. Or, you know, like find what works for you in your space and don't sweat those. Don't don't be so hung up on total self-sufficiency that you end up you end up straining, working really hard for a little return, right?

SPEAKER_01 33:30

Right.

SPEAKER_00 33:30

Get the 80% off the top that takes 20% of the work.

SPEAKER_01 33:34

Right.

SPEAKER_00 33:34

And leave and let the rest go.

SPEAKER_01 33:36

Well, and honestly, who we are, part of our core values is being connected to community.

SPEAKER_02 33:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 33:44

Which means I do need help from my neighbor for this thing.

SPEAKER_02 33:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 33:49

I'm gonna share the extra of what I have with them, and they share the extra of what they have with me. So I don't have to grow everything, and and that's okay. And I I heard Jess from Roots and Refuge in in one of her episodes that I just watched, she was commenting, she was making some pickled veggies, and she thought that she was gonna have for the first time ever, like I she was making like a pickled veggie mix. So she had some peppers and some which she thought she was gonna be able to use, some cauliflower, which normally she doesn't have any left, but it ended up being two riddled with bugs. Anyways, long story short, she said she had somebody reach out to her in a comment, feeling like they were cheating because they were trying to make this recipe and they had to go buy half of it from the local market because their garden they didn't have all of the things in their garden. Yeah, and she was like, um, I do that all the time. Like, and it's not just we don't grow everything we eat. And she said, like, the more the further along this gardening journey we get, more and more of what I'm putting away is coming from my garden. But there's no shame in having to buy some somebody else's screw. And it's not cheating, and it's okay.

SPEAKER_00 35:10

And we we live in America. There are more products available to us as Americans than most people would guess.

SPEAKER_02 35:19

Oh yeah, oh yeah.

SPEAKER_00 35:20

It's literally hundreds of millions of various products. I think Walmart advertises that they have 500 million items for sale. That's insane to me.

SPEAKER_02 35:29

That's crazy.

SPEAKER_00 35:30

But the point is that you can't grow every squash, every bean, every tomato, every, you know, you can't do it. No farm is doing it.

SPEAKER_02 35:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 35:39

You might grow your favorites, but you're not gonna grow all of them. So don't try. Right? Just do what you what makes you happy. We're growing a buttload of tomatoes. That makes us happy. We're gonna make sauce and salsa and canned the whole nine yards with the tomatoes. We're really good at that. Our corn has yet to be seen. Maybe it will, maybe it won't.

SPEAKER_01 36:01

We're gonna have a little bit to taste. We'll have a little bit, but we're not gonna, it's not gonna be.

SPEAKER_00 36:06

The potatoes look promising. Next year, they'll probably be pretty good.

SPEAKER_02 36:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 36:09

So things like that that we're gonna find our wins and run with it. And the things that we're just like, man, this really sucks. This is if we're not in the right spot to grow, right? Yeah, whatever it is, then we're not don't waste your time, right? Don't beat your head, don't feel insufficient because you couldn't grow bananas on your Nebraska homestead, you know, like it's just not gonna happen. So don't don't try. Don't right, um, don't waste your time. Yeah, right. Do the wins, get the wins.

SPEAKER_01 36:37

So the biggest encouragement is just we've said it so many times, but don't wait. Start where you are, do what you can, use what you have, yes, and share with your neighbors. You will be surprised at how much you can do in a very small space that is well managed and taken care of.

SPEAKER_00 36:56

Yeah, that's good advice. Yeah, that's good advice. And again, share with your neighbors. Yeah, if you get three beautiful tomatoes off your one beautiful tomato plant, call your next door neighbor and say, here's a tomato, because we're neighbors.

SPEAKER_02 37:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 37:10

And my name is Thomas, right?

SPEAKER_01 37:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 37:13

But you might get something a little more valuable than your produce out of your garden this year.

SPEAKER_01 37:17

So that's good. Awesome.

SPEAKER_00 37:19

Got anything else for the kids?

SPEAKER_01 37:21

I think that's it for tonight. Thank you so much for joining us for this conversation. Hopefully, it has inspired you and encouraged you to just start where you are, use what you have, big or small. So yeah.

SPEAKER_00 37:34

Sorry. We'll catch you next time.

SPEAKER_01 37:37

Subscribe now to Handmade Happiness so you never miss an episode. And let's find the joy in making one handmade moment at a time.