1 and 1/3rd acre, 400 fruiting plants plus flowering trees/shrubs/vines and a veggie garden. I tend to plant in groups, and many of my older trees are on dwarfing rootstocks so it is easy to keep them small. An example - on Fruit Tree Hill I have a Barbados Cherry, Cacao, Cinnamon, Ice Cream Mango, Alano Sapodilla, Papayas, Red Lime, many Bananas, Pineapples, Pomegranates, KM Sugar Apple and Coffees. A Black Bat Plant, Starfish Clerodendrums, and a nice small Blue-flowering ground cover add color and interest. The arch we walk through next to FTH is covered with Passion vines, Possum Purple and Yellow-fruiting varieties. On the left of the arch are various Annonas, Citrus, Bamboo, Cashew, Ylang ylang, Moringas, African Tulip Tree, and Orchids tucked into the Palmetto hedge. As you can see, we fit a lot of plants together, and the end result is very nice! I have many fruiting plants in containers too, on the patio. That is how my collection started, since I had to grow close to the house to try to prevent theft by squirrels. Since we got our Jack Russell Terrier, we no longer worry about squirrels. Have fun choosing your plants! Lisa

I have been pondering how I would answer this question ever since you posted it yesterday. It is hard to give a definite answer like "you'd need 1 acre" (or 2 or 3, etc.) because too many variables are unknown. The most important variable is the kind of soil on the property and the annual average rainfall (though annual rainfall numbers aren't as helpful as we'd like to think). If you found property with a deep, sandy loam soil that drains well and yet also holds water well, you likely could get by with a somewhat smaller piece of land. However, if you found a place that is excessively rocky or that has only a shallow layer of topsoil on top of bedrock, you'd likely need a larger piece of land. If you found clay soil, you'd have to amend it a lot to make it workable, but at least it is highly fertile once you've added organic material and other material to it to improve both its water-holding capacity and its ability to drain well. However, clay soil requires more irrigation in hot periods because most clay bakes hard as concrete in high temperatures and low rainfall. You can ill afford to let the ground get so hard and dry that it is like concrete because, when you do, plants die and also, when rain returns, it rolls off that hard, clay ground just like water rolls off a table top. So, my answer would vary depending on the type of soil you were dealing with. Rainfall and available groundwater is a huge issue. If you buy land in an area that generally has 35-45" or more of rainfall a year, you could space your plants somewhat more closely together and they'd be fine most years. If, on the other hand, you find land in an area that averages 28-32" a year or less, you might have to plant trees further apart so they weren't competing too much with one another for the available moisture in the soil. If you found a place with a well, or one where you have water rights and can drill a well, that's a bonus, but only if the water is of good quality. Irrigation can be very costly if you are having to buy water from a municipality or a rural water co-op, and you may not be able to afford to irrigate an orchard and a vegetable garden in the persistently dry, drought-plagued years that have been so common in the last decade. Is it possible to dryland farm/garden without irrigation? Once the plants are well-established (which can take several years with trees), maybe, but part of dryland farming or dryland gardening in the total absence of irrigation is that you have to space plants further apart so the roots of each plant can spread out as far as possible to find any available moisture in the soil. That means you'd need more space. You have so many things to consider when looking for a piece of land that is large enough for a home, outbuildings, a lawn (if you choose to have a lawn or if you are in a semi-rural sub-division with an HOA that requires a lawn), space for children to play or for animals to live or play, a garage or storage shed, possibly a garden shed/potting shed or greenhouse, a cold frame, a driveway, a storm shelter, and land for utility easements....and an orchard and vegetable garden. You also likely will want to grow some herbs and flowers either within the orchard and veggie garden or in them. All the above requires a lot of space. If you buy land far enough out in the country that it is not hooked up to a municipal sewage system, then you also will need room for a septic tank and either the septic system's lateral lines or a lagoon, depending on what is appropriate for your soil. I'd suggest you use graph paper (either a physical sheet of paper or an online design program that let's you draw out your dream place on your computer) and try to lay out a house, driveway, the outbuildings, the garden, orchard, etc. that you want. Draw it to scale and see what fits onto one acre. Then ask yourself if that one acre is enough or if you need 2 (or more) acres. If one acre doesn't seem like it is enough, try graphing it on 2 acres and see how that looks on paper. Remember that any piece of land not occupied by a building, hardscaping like a patio or driveway, waterways like ponds or creeks, or by garden beds will have to be mowed and maintained. Buying a place that is too big can leave you with a huge mowing chore. We have slightly under 15 acres. It is 14.4, but most of it is wooded, so our house and outbuildings (a large detached garage, potting shed, 2 chicken coops with fenced chicken runs, a storage shed, a greenhouse and a tornado shelter), 4 separate fenced garden plots, orchard, chicken coops/chicken runs, driveway, utility easement, septic system/lagoon, etc., fenced dog yard with shade structures, and also wildflower meadows and mostly-dry ponds fill about 3 acres. We likely could have squeezed it all into 2 or 2.5, but we like having everything spaced out a certain way. Our dogs cannot escape their well-fenced dog yard, but the chickens can (and sometimes do) fly into the dog yard, so it is smart, for example, to keep a reasonable distance between our dogs and our chickens. The way you choose to raise your edible plants also determines how much land you need. I'd suggest you read Rosaline Creasy's 2010 book "Edible Landscaping" and think about incorporating edible crops into your standard landscaping as well as growing them in a dedicated garden plot and a dedicated orchard. At least some of your nut trees, if carefully sited, can put shade in areas where you need them...shading, for example, your backyard (if edible crops that need full sun aren't growing there) or the south or west side of your house. We have a very large pecan tree that shades part of our yard, the edge of the big garden (unfortunately, but you can make that shade work to your advantage in summer), and the two chicken coops with their fenced chicken runs. Other pecan trees shade the side yard to the north of our house. You can plant some fruit trees right in the yard, if you choose. They don't all have to be restricted to an orchard setting. We have fruit trees in our front yard, the side yard on the south side of the house, and in a mini-orchard out back of the house a fairly large distance from the house (over 100' from the house). Our walnuts are down in the woodland where they belong. I don't want them up near the house and gardens creating problems. Remember that you cannot plant anything too far from the house without making provisions to provide water for the far-away plantings. You don't want to have to drag a bunch of water hoses several hundred of feet every time you have to water an orchard or garden. Your gardening style will influence how much land you need. If you grow using traditional narrow rows of crops with wide spacing between rows to accomodate a garden tractor, that will require a much larger amount of space than if you grow in wide rows of plants interspersed with narrow footpaths. If you grow biointensively in raised beds filled with highly-amended soil and you utilize pretty close spacing of plants, you can get by with less land, but will have to provide water more often since the plants are so close to one another. (For an idea of how to grow in this method, check out John Jeavons' excellent book "How To Grow More....." (the title is too long to type so I'll link it below). Your orchard management can allow you to grow a lot of trees in a fairly compact orchard, but you'd have to use all dwarf or semi-dwarf trees, and invest a considerable amount of time in keeping them properly pruned so it didn't become an unruly mess. You might want to go to the Fruit and Orchard forum and read about some of the pruning and spacing methods that people use to grow a lot of fruit in a fairly compact space. You also could espalier fruit trees (this is discussed in Creasy's "Edible Landscaping" book) alongside building walls or fences to save space as well. With the vegetable garden, a key issue is whether you merely want to raise enough food so that you always are eating from the garden whatever is in season at the current time or whether you want to raise more than you can eat fresh and then process and preserve the rest. If that is the case, you need a lot more land and you need a storage place for all the food you want preserve, regardless of which method you use for preservation: dehydration, fermentation, canning, freezing, root cellar storage, etc. If you have pets, you need a spot for them. Even the friendliest, happiest dog or cat can be very destructive in a garden setting. I love our pets, but most of them are fenced out of the garden plots and for good cause. If you buy rural to semi-rural acreage, you need to know that every single wild thing that walks on the ground, swims in the water, lives underground or that flies in the sky will want to share your space with you, and you will find it impossible (and, in fact, undesirable) to maintain acreage that is free of all those life forms. On our acreage we have or have had all the following (though not necessarily all at the same time): cottontail rabbits, white-tail deer, skunks, possums, armadillos, squirrels, rats, raccoons, field mice, moles, gophers, voles, ring-tail cats, beavers, coyotes, bobcats, an occasional cougar or two, turtles, skinks, snakes (both venomous and non-venomous), frogs, toads, snakes, lizards, feral hogs, snakes, all kinds of birds including predator birds that will feed on our chickens if we aren't careful about protecting them, wild birds of all sorts (mostly desirable), fish in our ponds and creeks, and every insect and arachnid you ever could imagine and probably a few thousand kinds you've never seen before. In order to protect your plantings from all or at least most of the above, you need to have protective measures in place. For our gardens, 8' tall fences are the only thing that successfully keeps deer out of our gardens and, if the gardens aren't fenced down low to the ground, the rabbits eat voraciously, especially in late winter and early spring. Putting up fencing and doing it well to the animals cannot go under it, over it or through it, is a challenge and a major expense. You need to plan on this when you are laying out the area that will be your vegetable garden and orchard. Can you have a veggie garden and fruit trees without fencing? Of course you can, but you'll find yourself fighting the wildlife nonstop some years. I think it is easier to have the garden plantings fenced, and it has saved my sanity and really lowered my stress level. Wildlife can work, literally, 24/7 to get into your edible plantings and eat them, so you have to outsmart them and to exclude them. Our first huge (and not unexpected) issue after buying our land was merely the time and expense involved in clearing a place along the property line to put in a fence in order to fence in our 14.4 acres to exclude the horses, cows and goats that lived on nearby land. You cannot assume your neighbor's farm animals will not 'escape' their own fenced-in pastures and pop-up on your place. It happens, and sometimes it happens often. You'll also need an area to have a compost pile in order to make compost on a continual basis for your garden plots. You'll need an area for trash. Even in rural areas, there's trash service available, but you need a place to keep your trash cans, bins, dumpster, etc. If you buy bare land and build a house, you will need not only a place to park your vehicles, but a place where all sorts of service vehicles, including the utility companies and delivery trucks, can enter your property, drive up to the house, and still have a large enough area to turn around in order to head back down the driveway again. You'll need a parking area for several visiting vehicles since there isn't space on most rural roads for roadside parking. If you buy a house in a brand-new sub-division, be sure you understand all the land-use covenants. If there is a Homeowner's Association, you may find a lot of rules in place that can largely impede your ability to grow what you want, where you want it and how you want it. HOA rules can be incredibly restrictive, and you cannot just ignore them and do as you please or you'll have a lot of expensive legal issues. If I was wanting to do what you are wanting to do, I'd prefer to start with nothing less than 2 acres. You certainly could do it with less, but then as all the nut trees grew and starting making a lot of shade, you might feel like you were losing too much land to shade and you might start wishing you had more open, unshaded, sunny land. If you want to maintain meadows of native grasses and wildflowers for the wildlife, for example, or a little woodland space for them, you might wish to have 3 acres. Maybe you want a little water garden pond with water lilies, or a fishing pond with a dock. Try drawing out everything you want on paper or on a computer design program and see how it all works out. My experience has been that people who move "to the country" often are not realistic in their expectations about what they can do on a half-acre or acre lot and quickly find that they wish they'd bought a somewhat bigger piece of land. My brother had two acres and that worked fairly well for just a garden, a blackberry bed, and fruit trees, but by the time he added a lot of poultry, goats, three dogs and a donkey, I think he was kinda wishing he had three acres because the goats were too close to his boat and he often came outside to find the goats playing "king of the hill" with his fishing boat serving as "the hill" and all the poultry and dogs joining in the fun. Usually, someone who moves to the country in order to have a nice big garden spot always seems to end up wishing they had "just a little more" land than what they bought. We were looking for 2-5 acres when we found this place and I was worried that 14.4 acres would be too much for us. As it turned out, it was just about the right size of land...but that is true only because about 2/3s of it is heavily forested. That filled my husband's need to have trees (he grew up in a very heavily forested semi-rural area in Pennsylvania) while leaving me plenty of open, sunny land for growing things and for raising animals. I wouldn't have wanted 14 acres of grassland because the maintenance of that much land would have been a nightmare. We stay busy enough just mowing 3 or so acres. I hope this gives you a lot to think about before you begin searching for land. We had seen the land we ended up buying long before it went on the market and had driven by it several times because a friend told us the local rumor was that the land eventually was going to be sold. As we looked at other pieces of land in this area over a period of several months, we found something "wrong" with each piece of property that kept us from buying it. I think that both of us, deep down, really just wanted to keep our options open until this place we have now was put on the market. At times it was frustrating to look and look and look at one piece of property after another, because each piece of property we viewed had potential, but none of them was "the one" we thought was just right. We were eager to find the right land and build a house so we could move to the country, and almost bought a different piece of land but decided against it because it was all river bottom land that would, inevitably, flood (which it did, big-time, in 2007). As it turned out, this place we bought was the perfect place for us and I'm grateful we took our time and looked at many pieces of property and made a careful decision about which one was best for us. This place is so right for us and for the rural lifestyle we live that it is like it was meant to be all along! We have absolutely the best neighbors in the world, not just right next door, but up and down the road in every direction. I love living here. I hope you will find your own perfect little place so you can have the garden and orchards you want. Dawn

If I understand you correctly, the perc tests have been done and have passed but no septic permit has been issued. In my area, raw land is sold all the time without the seller providing any perc test information. If the buyer wants the info he usually pays for it although it is not unusual for contracts to be made contingent on perk test results that indicate the land will support a suitable septic system. As for the actual septic permit itself, in my area those are not issued until the house site is selected and the house plans are solidified including where the driveway and all other hard scape will run, where the house will be situated, and how big the house will be including number of bedrooms and bathrooms. A leach field and septic system that would be perfectly adequate for an 1800 sq ft 3 bedroom 1.5 bath house would be totally inadequate for a 5000 sq ft 6 bedroom 7 bath home with a swimming pool. The county wants to know what you plan to build before they'll issue a septic permit. So there is no way the seller can get the permit for you. So here, getting the septic permit is part of the building permitting process. To get a septic permit, along with a ton of other documents, you have to provide the county with a copy of the site map showing EXACTLY where the house and all hard scape will be situated along with where you think you would like the leach field septic tanks to be located. Then the county sends someone out to inspect everything and he designates, on your map, EXACTLY where he has decided that your tank and leach fields need to go. And those spots may or may not be exactly where you thought you wanted them. But once the county designates the spots and gives you a permit, that is where you have to put the field and the tanks. If you change the size of the house or decide to move the driveway over by 20 feet or even add in a sidewalk, you have to go back to the county and get a new septic permit or at least approval for a variance on the old permit. Since your agent is saying that a septic permit is a "must have," perhaps things are done differently in your area... It would surprise me tho to find that any county would issue a septic permit without knowing how much sewage was likely to be covered by that septic permit. I also can't imagine that having a septic permit in place is a legal requirement to sell raw land anywhere since the seller himself obviously acquired the land at some point in the past and it apparently didn't come to him with a septic permit in place...or he would just pass that on to you. How much experience does your real estate agent have with raw land purchases? I would contact the county permitting offices (also sometimes called the county development services offices) and ask them to explain the process for getting a septic permit. You'll probably find that the seller CANNOT get one for you because there is just too much that he doesn't know about what you plan to do with the property. And just to answer you question about cost, my septic permit cost $560.

I have a half acre, all that's left of the original 300 acre farm. I'm surrounded by 1950's raised ranches. We have 2 indoor cats, 9 of 10 koi, and a German Shepherd that thinks the cats are rabbits in the house. Poor kitties live in fear, but he's such a great dog otherwise, I just work around it. We have a few rabbits and squirrels outside, and I've seen an occasional possom and raccoon. The dog tends to keep them all at a distance. Ideally, we'd have at least 2 acres, maybe up to 10 or 20, and I'd get the dog a playmate. My daughter would love to have horses, but she really doesn't understand the work they require. Two acres would give us room for the dog to run, more room for a pool and a basketball court and gardens. Always ;-) Hunzi