Falling in, and out of, love with the land: The dream
(If you haven't already,
you'll want to start with this
excerpt from the very beginning of Growing
Into a Farm.)
My homesteading dream
began nearly as soon as I was born onto another southwest-Virginia
farm owned by my back-to-the-lander parents. When you spend
your early childhood chasing ornery cows back into the barn,
eating all the strawberries before they get ripe so you don't have
to share them, and climbing sap-riddled pine trees, the reality of
farm life seems to be summed up in one word—bliss. The signs
of my parents' rough path through farm ownership were all around
me in their stress-induced arguments, but I only took in the joy
of wading through creeks all summer and catching minnows for my
cat.
When my parents
finally threw in the towel and dragged us to town, I was eight
years old and unwilling to go. Too timid to pull a
My-Side-of-the-Mountain and live up to my threat of running away
to reside on the farm by myself, I still vowed that one day I
would buy a farm of my own that I would never leave.
By the time I
graduated from college, my childhood vision had solidified into a
plan. At that time (2000), property in my part of Appalachia
could still be had for about $1,000 per acre if you selected a
spot in the boondocks, so I figured I should be able to save up
$10,000 and buy ten acres within ten years. I'd pay for the
land with cash and live in my car and tent until I'd saved again,
this time enough to build a small house. My goal was
self-sufficiency—for the farm to provide for enough of my needs
that I hardly had to work in the outside world. Simple and
feasible, right?
Stay tuned for the next installment tomorrow, or read
the entire book here.
| This post is part of our Growing into a Farm lunchtime series.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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This post got me to thinking. So, I looked, and couldn't find any detail about how you actually your land. I've been trying here in Florida and keep hitting a brick wall of Realtors trying to make a living. Give me a hint of where to look, please??
Tom, this article could be interesting to you. http://www.homestead.org/NeilShelton/HowToBuyLand/VeryCheaply.htm
Now, take that at face value. I'm currently renting, living in a city, engaged to be married, and not likely to get OUT of the city for a couple more years, so I haven't implemented any of this author's ideas. However, my common sense says that there could be some truth to what he's saying and that with a little extra work, a person could find something that they wouldn't have found on ruralland.com or whatever those sites are.