A Sunday Morning 5-Acre Homestead Fantasy, Right Here Where I'm At

I frequently dream about buying the little chunk of the farm that our trailer is on. It is approximately 5 acres with plenty of water seeping out all over it. It is inclined to the Northeast, meaning it gets little afternoon sun and little sun when the sun is very low in the winter. I know from moving the cows through here that the pasture is of fairly low quality, especially later in the season. All that aside, though, I like to imagine the homestead I would make if I were own it.

Perimeter of property

You can see our trailer on the left side, little white thing

It is about a 5-acre chunk, sloping to the East. The middle area is fairly open, and there is about  an acre of flattish land or so in the middle. There's a nice grove in the NW corner, and a bunch of gorgeous old cedars, maples, and a spruce along the Eastern side, down by where the swamp begins. It is bordered by the swamp along the eastern line, the road along the south and west, and a perennial creek along the north. The middle is pretty sunny, so there is maybe an acre of potential planting space, but it's also the best pasture.

We would always have more than enough water here, and would swale the land to control seepage. A couple of dairy goats and their edible kids could be moved around the pasture and periodically graze the willows and alders in the swamp. We would have coppice groves for goat fodder. We could keep a pig and feed it on household excess, and extra corn. Some dual-purpose ducks and or chickens for eggs and meat. We could shoot a deer every year.

The acre of garden space would grow corn and beans and vegetables. 1/10th acre of beans and chickpeas, 3/10 acre of corn and cereals, and 1/10 acre of vegetables should be more than enough for the whole year. The remaining half-acre could be used for herbal leys for the livestock. We'd dig out the many rocks from this acre over time and stack them to make paddock walls.

Among the coppices we'd grow our fruit trees, nut trees, fruit bushes, nut bushes, and useful plants for stakes, posts, and fuelwood. We could interplant nitrogen-fixers for coppicing, such as black locust, among the fruits and nuts, with the added benefit that the goats would love the branches.

We'd have the place set up real nice with certain tent pads kept away from the animals under the cedars so we could have a summer pig roast and invite all our friends for a long weekend every year.

We could replace the trailer with a nice little wood-heated home, or a newer trailer, with a woodstove, a carport, and a shop/garage.

It would be cold and dark and damp in the winter, but in the summer we'd harness the high sun and bright mornings to grow what we needed, even if our yields were lower than they would be in the open or on a south-facing slope.

"Design Your Life," a class

A course on how to live the life you want to live. How to create your own alternative. How to march to a different drummer without losing the beat. Life Visioning. Strategies. Tactics. Skills. Systems.

Readings:

Pirsig, "The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" (Quality)
Csikszentmihalyi, "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience" (Flow)
Aristotle, concept of Eudaimonia & Umair Haque at HBR (Happiness)
Sections from Early Retirement Extreme

Division of labor between Home and School

YOU take care of drilling the basics: reading, writing, math.
I teach them how to integrate it and apply it in real-world settings.

And the obvious thing: a class which critically engages the notion of self-sufficiency

What does it mean to be self-sufficient?

Have people ever been self-sufficient?

Is self-sufficiency a goal worth striving for?

How do we become more self-sufficient?

What does self-sufficiency look like in modern America?

Can we be competent at everything?

What are the economic trade-offs associated with being a generalist vs. a specialist?

Is there a happy medium?

Reading List: 

Helen and Scott Nearing, "The Good Life"
Gene Logsdon, chapter on Amish from "Living at Nature's Pace"
Elizabeth Gilbert, "The Last American Man"
Thomas Thwaites, "The Toaster Project: Or a Heroic Attempt to Build a Simple Electric Appliance from Scratch"
William Coperthwaite, "A Handmade Life: In Search of Simplicity" (?)
Something about the biodynamic "whole farm organism"
Thoreau, "Walden"
Something about the Open-Source movement
Marcin Jakubowski's curriculum for K-Ph.D. education
Bland and Bell, 2007, "A Holon Approach to Agroecology"
An Indicator Framework for Assessing Agroecosystem Resilience
Jane Jacobs, "The Nature of Economies"
Thomas Jefferson's Agrarianism

The Renaissance Man Ideal

Apparently Aldous Huxley wrote:

Know something about everything and everything about something.

I do believe this is an identical goal to my own,

Jack of all trades, master of one.

And this is what I come down to being interested in: being a renaissance man! Here we develop systems thinking, integrative intelligence, abstract thinking, intution, and so on, by saturating oneself with information while practicing constantly. We develop a person that can approach any problem with a diverse set of experiences and thus creative, novel, or "emergent" solutions. He or she is capable, response-able. He or she knows enough about things in general to be able to learn any new thing quickly. By exploring the lay of multiple geographies, one comes to develop an intuition for how geographies function, what the laws are that govern them, how they behave and tend.

Jacob Lund Fisker, in his book Early Retirement Extreme, identifies seven fields in which a person can develop him or herself. These are:

physiological
economical
intellectual
emotional
social
technical
ecological

He provided two illustrative graphs:

A specialists skill set

A Renaissance man's skill set

The original Renaissance ideal of a polymath believed a man should:

• Be able to defend himself with a variety of weapons, especially the sword. 
• Be able to play several musical instruments.
• Be able to paint and output other works of art. 
• Be forever interested in advancing knowledge and science.
• Be able to engage in debates regarding issues such as philosophy and ethics.
• Be a skilled author and poet.

In a school for Renaissance men and women, we might teach:

• basic fitness and meditation (discipline for body and mind)
• gardening or farming (for ecological intelligence)
• a craft such as woodworking or website design
• the scientific method
• money management
• communications, including presentations
• generic problem-solving and analysis

and encourage students to pursue, on their own time:

• a sport or martial art
• music, art, graphic design, poetry, dance, or other "fine" art
• an advanced subject such as higher math or science or literature
• debate

And these meta-subjects:

• strategy and tactics
• critical thinking and analysis