Our top choice for a pasture is the powerline cut area down in the floodplain.  The electric company chopped a big swathe through the woods, and we can't let trees grow there, so we might as well put it to use.

This weekend, I did some measuring and discovered that the open area along the powerline is approximately one sixth of an acre.  It used to be farmed, long before we bought the land, so two ditches bisect its width (and so does our driveway.)  At the moment, I'm thinking of using osage-orange hedges to split the powerline cut into four paddocks along these obvious dividing lines.

If we ever feel ready to have dairy animals, I've recently been thinking our best bet would be miniature goats.  They're short, so fences don't have to be quite so intense, and they use less pasture per animal so we might be able to fit in two does and a buck.  With four tiny paddocks, we'd be able to keep the buck separate and still have room to rotate all the animals frequently to prevent overgrazing and parasites.  Of course, this is still very much in the dreaming stages --- I expect our hedges to take anywhere from a year to five years to be beefy enough to deter critters, and we still need to find someone willing to milk when we're away from home!

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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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