I'm just curious if you have gardened before? !/4-1/2 acre is a LOT of land to take care of! JMHO, Nancy

This is more or less what I've done for about 15 years now. About 30 years ago, I was one of those with the land but, nobody came by looking to rent it . . .

It has been fairly simple. I haven't paid a dime in actual rent. A lot of people who live in agricultural areas have no interest in farming. Many "farmers" are leasing out their land for others to farm and there are sooooo many people with 5, 10, 15 acres and maybe a horse or 2.

Often, farmland lies in irrigation districts. The property owner pays for water whether he or she uses it or not.

All that may work out for a friend-of-a-friend or the neighboring gardener who takes his hoe across the road one day and begins gardening over there. That's how I got where I am. There have been a couple different properties; owned by retired folks. One was a separate triangle of level ground. It took a little geometry to fit my rectangular beds into it. It was like 160 feet on the side.

Currently, I am between a hay barn and 2 little hay fields. Irrigation is with 4" pipe and field sprinklers. A neighbor who does custom field work does the tilling.

I suggest talking to the local small business people or the local pastors about what you are interested in. They may know of some opportunity or they have a bulletin board.

Or, just stop by a place and ask. Look for land that doesn't seem to have much or any use - a small piece of ground that's hard to get equipment to is often a lot of bother to farm.

Steve

What are you planning to grow?

My house is on a full acre and my garden beds, which have been under development for 4 years, are about 1500 sf. After getting the beds established, they don't really need a lot of work, but it takes me years to get the soil right.

Tilling will bring up weed seeds, especially if the land was pasture. You would want to start preparing the bed this fall. And you'd want to decide on a particular method of gardening; lasagna, raised bed, no till, Ruth Stout, Ed Smith, etc.

Would you be living in the cottage full time? Do you have a planting plan? A diet plan? Do you have experience with either gardening or with cooking and canning fresh foods?

In many meals, things like potatoes are side dishes. If you're going to feed yourself, the potatoes become a more important factor in your meal plans because they are easy to grow, somewhat easy to store; you'll eat more potatoes than you otherwise might.

I buy dry pinto beans in bulk instead of trying to grow them. Ditto for flour and sugar. I don't get raise my own meat, but that's in the plan. Berries, fruit trees, and asparagus take years to get established. The implication is that you're going to grow some fresh food, but I have doubts that the majority of your diet will be from this garden.

The expression I've heard is; take care of the soil and the soil will take care of your plants. I've heard that in France, when some gardeners move, they take their garden soil with them. Most gardeners here are making a pretty serious investment in improving their soil, and it takes years.

I don't want to discourage you. If you just want to do it for one year, go for it. People do it all the time. But many of us make our beds, start the plants indoors for most foods, and the rest of the time we're just mulching, watering, harvesting. If you're tilling soil, you'll be weeding and feeding, especially the first year.

Is there a particular reason that you don't want to use the land around the cottage? Is it lawn?

It doesn't hurt to ask.

However, I've got to tell you that if you came and asked me, I'd tell you no.

A couple of reasons. Liability is a huge reason. You trip and fall and I get sued. (OK, I hope you wouldn't do that, but how am I to know who will and who won't sue me over a skinned knee?)

By far, the majority of beginning gardeners get as far as ripping the soil up and then decide it is too much work. It's quite expensive to plant pasture or hay, and it takes them awhile to get established. So if a beginner rips up my ground and then loses interest, I have the expense and the lost time to try to get my pasture reestablished.

My suggestion is that you start with some containers and maybe a raised bed or two on your own property. If the farmer sees that you have a well maintained garden, he will be more willing to rent you a small bit of ground.

1/2 acre? Crikey, are you trying to kill yourself with overwork?

Thanks for the feedback everyone.

- the land beside my cottage is not suitable for this garden, because there is too much shade. I already have a number of raised beds there, which I will keep, but can't really add any more in this area.

- I have been gardening for a couple of years now. I am planning on growing more potatoes, tomatoes, corn, beans, cucumber, carrots and eggplant, as well as various lettuces and herbs. I am going to freeze/can/cold store as much as I can, and give away or possibly sell the rest. I am mostly interested in seeing how much food I can grow for myself next year, an experiment in homesteading I guess.

1/4 acre is probably the most I could actually garden next year. If I can find suitable land, I will see what I can do to get it ready this fall.

- good point about the tilling bringing up weed seeds, I hadn't thought about that! I currently use the square foot method in raised beds, but am interested in trying to plant in tilled rows.

My plan is as follows:

1. find land asap for use next year. The ideal land would be land that is being used now for something like hay, and to see if I can rent a small corner of a larger field. Negotiate with the farmer on having him till this land when he tills the rest of the field, or, rent/buy a rototiller.

2. get my composting materials moved to the site. I have some local connections for cattle and horse manure,etc., and would be able to get this dropped off.

3. get my irrigation system figured out. The land I have in mind is beside a river. However, how I would pump the water from the river to a holding tank is something I have to think about, especially if there is no power at the location.

Lots of things to figure out!

If you are not an experienced large-scale gardener, forget it. Unless we are talking about prime bottom-land with reliable year-round rain (is there any such place?).

I have been staple cropping an acre of old pasture, without irrigation and with little fertilizer input, for a decade. Other than an initial tilling it has been by hand, but mechanized tillage in the absence of the water and fertilizer would have made things worse. As an ecological/horticultural experiment it has been informative; in terms of crops per unit of time it has been a boondoggle. However, if I had to get enough food to survive out of droughty soils of low fertility I would know what not to waste time on.

If you are going to be living at the cottage for the summer then it may work out for you. Otherwise, you are looking for a world of pain every time you come up. I have a 2500 sqft garden occupying an old cattle holding yard. In mid June I had an operation that has kept me at about 30% since then. You have no idea how quickly that space can revert to a weed field if you are not tending to it regularly.

Further, a 1/2 acre is a massive garden. That's 21,000 square feet! Unless you are utilizing power equipment like a small to mid-sized tractor, and/or employing a small army of helpers, you are going to end up disapointed and discouraged.

Start smaller, like a few hundred square feet of raised beds and see if you can keep up with that.

BTW, this is what a 2500 square foot garden looks like a the height of weed season after 4 hours of weeding (with another 6 hours or so to go to finish the job). Repeat that every week and a half. If you look to the left, that is what the "natural" state of the land is; three foot high weeds, thick enough to lose a small child:

{{gwi:82482}}

Michael

If you want to rent land, not turn up weeds, build movable beds. The new square foot gardening book, I bought mine for 5 bucks at a dollar store here, tells you make beds with plywood bottoms and holes drilled into them to make them mobile.

You won't tear up as much ground, just mow it, put your beds into place, and if you have to move, you take your soil with you. If you're renting you might think you might have to move closer or even to a new area mid season.

My mother had a garden by a roadside, a friends property, she had a good crop of tomatoes for sure. Like people with septic tanks in their yard, sometimes you have to go somewhere else.

I'm afraid that if one were to use plywood for bottoms of beds they would hardly last a year before they rotted. Not a good idea IMO.

Greg
Nevada

A rule of thumb for a vegetable garden I found in a big gardening book was 50 m^2 per person (multiply by 10 to get a rough guess for square feet). So Michael's 2500er garden has quite a good size and will need a a good number of work hours.

So renting 1/4 or 1/2 acre is a bit of overkill. My family's house has a garden of that size, but most of it is just grass to make hay - which is more of a burden (ok, a nice chunk of butchered sheep in red wine sauce with potato dumplings eases the pain temporarily).

When the gramps were forced into the agro coop in the late 60s they just fenced off an area with the house's well in it. Noone had a prob with it and there was a 1/3 acre garden. Dad planted like 20 fruit trees and the veggie/potato/turnips area was like 60x4-5 meters, so approx. 2500 square feet. 10 work hours (plenty more in the heatwave we have atm - 100 watering cans a day) a week in growing season and it gives lots of veggies (the big deep freeze comes in handy). I just finished strawberries (200 pounds, best harvest I have ever seen!) 2/3 sold to relatives/peeps from our village. Selling surplus pays for the seeds :-).

So my suggestion: go easy, 500 square feet veggies per head is enough. Strawberries are a must, other berries/currants are nice (and will always find someone who eats them). If that's not enough and you are in for the long run plant a couple of fruit trees.

Keep the size down to where it's still fun and not a burden.

Michael (the Fitzer) from Germany

Some people have trouble with critters...like deer, raccoons, beetles, and birds. Just being there once or twice a week, you might discover things in turmoil...like weeds, drought, insects, critters. Being adjacent to fields of hay or pasture might lessen spray drift concerns, but heighten concerns about a calf getting loose.

I agree with starting small and getting bigger. Nothing is more paralyzing than feeling overwhelmed. You might also want to look into the urban sustainable movement to see what folks are growing intensively on a small amount of land for ideas on how to get a lot of production out of a small space. Work smarter, not harder.

Good Grief! I'd hate to actually move soil!

Ohio State tells us that soil may weigh more than 100 pounds per cubic foot! Building good soil is time consuming but moving it looks like the work for front end loaders and dump trucks.

That "triangle garden" that I talked about was on the bench above the river. I joked that I could cast from the garden into the river during high water. Using river water irrigation wasn't possible without the water rights.

The land had been used for nothing other than a race track for the kids' bikes before I got there because it was nearly impossible to get equipment on. The property owner had even rolled his lawn tractor while trying to get there to mow the weeds. Bringing a water line across the gully wasn't much trouble but I always thought about building a bridge . . .

I didn't find it comfortably accessible, that's for sure. It took a couple hundred yards of walking to get to it and to carry stuff away. Still, it was lovely and peaceful. I was there for 7 years.

The only reason I moved across the road to my current large veggie garden was because the elderly owners just had too many health problems. It was really obvious that they were going to sell out and move (the year after I left).

A garden can be just about any kind of growing that you want it to be. Since I started there late and didn't know how easy it would be for me to work, I only planted corn and squash the 1st year. Soon, I had a great variety of stuff.

Across the road, I started in July and had both gardens for the 1st year. It was so late that all I planted there was green beans. Of course, there was that day in September when I spent 10 hours picking beans . . .

Steve

If you've heard of that survival garden method using up the maximum of space in between plants, you won't have as much room as you think and treated or marine board, which is too expensive really, it would last.

If you made them with ferrocrete and a waterproof sealer, chicken wire reinforcement in between, added some old tricycle wheels to back side, a handle to lift with or a rope to pull it, moving it may not be that hard. Make a few a year and build up, but still being able to take it with you will probably benefit more. Maybe even taking an old flat top trailer that you haul garbage with, putting on top some beds and pipes to drain off the trailer, you would have a mobile garden.

You would have to be good with your hands building things to save money on that stuff.

Just drive around the country and look for a nice spot. There has to be someone with an empty lot. What about a city community garden? They have plots for rent each year, some big, some small.