Future Plans for More Land

Even though in my last post I discussed the ~1.5 acres that we're trying to buy, we're still making plans for more land.  There are just some things you can't do on an acre and a half, and there are some projects and experiments I have in mind that I think requires raw land to accomplish.  So today I'm going to share some of our ideas for getting more land.

First of all, we're planning on staying in the house we're trying to buy for 15-20 years.  Not only are we planning on having kids sometime in the next 3-5 years, but to me it makes better financial sense to stay in a house longer than not, so you can make the house work for you and earn back some or all of the interest and work you invest into it.  This house should be more than enough for us to raise a family in, so we're planning on making the most of it.

Additionally, there is a 5 acre parcel right across the street that is owned by the county that we're thinking would be nice to try to buy from them, and do some bigger permaculture on.  Having 5 acres across the street would make it a "sort-of" contiguous 6.5 acres, which is a really good sized parcel to grow a lot of food for a future potential family of 4.  We'd be able to have some more livestock, a larger food forest, a pond or two, and a sizeable farm forestry zone.

Beyond those 5 acres, we'd like to attempt the method that Paul Wheaton of Permies.com has implemented in Montana.  He has a smaller parcel of land he calls "Basecamp" where he and many of his interns/visitors reside, and are much larger parcel he calls "The Lab" that he does broader scoped things.  There are miles between these two parcels, but he's getting work done on both of them and it seems to be proceeding nicely.

We're thinking that once I get my design business up and running, the additional income from that business could help us buy 40-80 acres somewhere within an hour drive from our new house.  I could use this larger parcel to experiment with my broad acre ideas, start a permaculture education center, start a small eco-village, or all of the above.  Having my own "Lab" could be a service to the permaculture community at large, offering access to land for permaculture practitioners with lesser means, and improving their quality of life and the quality of permaculture research and design that I'm doing in my own work.  Also, having a larger parcel of land could help me fulfill my sense of obligation to the next 7 generations, giving them access to land that can better take care of the needs of an expanding family tree of my own.

So I haven't dismissed my vision of having a sizeable chunk of land, but the plan for getting there and what it will be when I do has changed.  In the meantime, I look forward to implementing permaculture on the 1.5 acres we probably will have, and getting practiced at some of the smaller acreage techniques that are so useful in zones 1 and 2.