Consider these illustrations as wish-lists for “someday.” Create a few sketches, perhaps in your garden journal, of what you think you’d like to have available over the next year or two. When you have a vision of what you’re looking for, you’ll be able to move forward with confidence.
This is an acronym I use when coaching blog clients, but it applies to planning anything: you need to have a P.L.A.N.: Precise, Lasting, Arrival, Natural.
Precise
Make your plans precise! Don’t be afraid to start planning the number of crops you want to plant.
Then figure out how much room they will take up and how much space you’ll give them. Now you know precisely how big to build that new garden plot.
Will you have gardens, livestock, or a mix of both? What crops will you want to grow? Part 2 of this book will detail some of the most popular and useful vegetables, herbs, and fruits to grow.
What animals can you house in the backyard? See Part 3 for some ideas of animals you could potentially keep on a smaller scale. Write down your wish list of what to grow and raise so you have a precise picture to work from and aren’t wasting your efforts.
Be sure to build a chicken coop the size you need. If you need six hens to supply your family’s egg needs and you can only house three hens in your coop, you’ve wasted your lumber, your time, your money, and your energy.
Wastefulness is almost the opposite of precision when it comes to planning. Often on the ranch we joke that nothing goes to waste. But it’s really true—everything serves two purposes, or the leftovers can be repurposed in some way. Not even our time is wasted, as leisurely summer nights spent watching a family movie are spent with purple-hull beans in our hands so we can shell out the beans while we watch the show.
Lasting
The best plan takes place over time and accounts for the effort it takes to achieve a particular goal.
It’s really easy to say “I want to have a fully self-sufficient homestead that completely supports my family with mature fruit trees, a well-established laying flock of chickens, and milk goats that are ready for milking.” That isn’t really a plan, though, that’s a wish. And because there’s no timeline attached to that wish, it’s going to feel more overwhelming to actually set out and do.
A plan looks more like this: “This January I’m going to buy my baby chicks so they will be ready to lay in July or August. I’m going to buy all my seeds for the year now while this nursery has free shipping, so I need to find my list of all the crops I want this year.”
Maybe this summer you clear out an old shade tree so in the fall you can replant the space with a bareroot fruit tree that will eventually take its place in the landscape, providing your family with food at the same time. Maybe you make arrangements to take your doe goat to a neighbor’s house to freshen (breed) so you’ll have a baby, and milk, in late winter.
Time is the taskmaster here. Often a plan is the realization that you aren’t going to have everything at once. You have to decide which elements need to be done now and which tasks could be done later. You also have to understand when certain things take place on the homestead. What happens each week? What happens each month? Chapter 16 will give you an overview of the seasonal rhythms of a backyard farm.
On a diFFerent Scale
Your plan doesn’t have to be elaborate—especially if you’re using your “extra” or fun money to get started, or have an outside income that is supporting your family and paying the bills. If you are taking on the challenge of a backyard farm from a hobby perspective, just create a list, decide on your first big step, and go after it!
Arrival
Arrival means you are heading in a particular direction. These are your specific goals. The sketch you put together of how you’re going to adapt your home into a working backyard farm should be clear! Of course, you will never reach that dream ideal in anything closely resembling a straight line. But with a clear-cut vision of what you want to achieve for your family, it will be easier to meet your goals even when unexpected setbacks occur.
To me, this variability of life is part of what makes having a plan so valuable. When unexpected things crop up, we can change the plan a little to accommodate the situation and then move easily to get back on track as soon as possible. For example, I was hoping to buy a greenhouse for the backyard because the plan was to increase the amount of food we were growing. Unfortunately, we had a situation come up with my husband’s work truck and it needed to be repaired. Bye-bye green-house money. Part of the repairs was a new set of tires on the truck, and I used the old tires to grow potatoes in a tower. It was amazing how many we produced in that very small area! Not to mention the fact that growing the potatoes vertically freed up two rows in the garden for more tomatoes.
Natural
This is the aspect of planning that I want you to keep firmly in mind as you read this book. You will be most successful when you work toward what is a natural fit for you and your family. Your plan should reflect you. All the ideas and suggestions are things you can do—things you might want to do, not things you have to do. So select a goal that makes sense to you. Start small if you have to. Go all out if you want to. Make your plan work for you, and you’ll be surprised how far you’ll come when you look back a couple years from now.
Write out your plan and start working out the most important elements of backyard farming to add first. For many people, that is a garden and a small flock of chickens. And that’s a great place to start. Then note what you need for those elements to be successful. Assess what you currently have and go from there.
On a diFFerent Scale
If you’re taking on a backyard farm as a business and planning to support your family without any addi-tional employment, you need to be a lot more detailed in your planning. Some market research, pricing information within your region, and estimated costs versus income projections will be needed.
Your garden will need a flat, well-drained, sunny area. If you don’t have one, you’ll have to create one. This might mean removing an out-of-place shade tree, digging up some lawn, building raised beds over a portion of the cement patio, adding containers to your balconies and window sills, or even just making reservations for a space at your local community garden.
Chickens will need housing of some kind. They will need space to roam and forage. They will need protection from predators. All of these elements may have to be added to your backyard if they aren’t already present. (See Chapter 12 for information about keeping chickens on a small scale.)