Start homesteading with the land you have right now! Grab a cup of tea or coffee because I’m going to take you through how to homestead on less than an acre and help you turn those homesteading dreams into a self sufficient reality.
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Homesteading is such a rewarding activity; the feeling of harvesting your first vegetable or your first fresh eggs is amazing and one you don’t forget in a hurry! But I keep reading in various Facebook groups that people want to homestead on the land they have in the city. So let’s dive in and see how to homestead on less than an acre, I do it every day even with a long work week and commute and you can totally do it too.
Learn The Rules For Your Area
To get started homesteading in a town, you need to first of all check your city’s regulations and find out if you can have a garden and what livestock options you have in your area. Home HOA do not allow vegetable gardens, chickens or bees. My city didn’t allow bees, rabbits and chickens until recently and now they do, for an annual fee, inspection and limits on numbers. I still can’t have goats in my area, even little ones and pigs are also out of the question as are ducks.
An internet search or a visit to your city’s planning or licensing department can let you know if you can have a traditional homestead or not. If you can’t have a suburban homestead, take a look at some other ways to start homesteading. There are homesteading activities you can do even if you can’t have the livestock or a huge vegetable garden
. Maybe you can set up some nice planters with veg and flowers right out the back of your porch or maybe you can have a small aquaponics system to grow veggies. One common trait of homesteaders is that when things don’t work out the way they hoped, they get creative!
Elements Of A Homestead
Some of the elements which make up a homestead include a garden for vegetables and herbs, an orchard or fruit garden, animal housing for chickens, ducks or quail, pens for pigs or goats, a medicinal herb garden, an apiary or beeyard, water collection, woodlands for fuel, grazing pasture and fields for growing animal fodder.
Let’s start with some traditional homesteading activities that you might want to pursue on your small plot:
- Gardening
- Composting
- Canning and food preservation
- Raising livestock
- Home butchering
These are typical activities which you often think of when you think of a homestead. On my suburban homestead (0.23 acres, corner lot) I’m able do the following homesteading activities:
- Grow a raised bed garden
- Grow a backyard orchard which is a permaculture food forest
- Grow cooking and medicinal herbs
- Raise bees
- Raise dual purpose chickens
- Compost
- Use season extension and greenhouse for gardening
- Grow hops for home brewed beer
- Grow vertically to grow more food in less space
- Make my own homemade fertilizers
- Can and preserve my own surplus
- Save seed and have started a seed bank
- Home butchering
With careful planning you can have a highly productive homestead, even on a small lot. Many of the activities on my suburban homestead do not require additional resources from outside of the property. Composting, homemade fertilizers and the garden are all self sufficient or self sustaining now ,for example, weeds make the fertilizer and the compost feeds the soil, non-edible plant matter, cut grass and chicken coop waste go into the compost heap.
Setting Up Your Homestead
Think carefully about where you are going to put the elements of your homestead. Your garden should be close to your house so you can check on it regularly and keep it watered. If you can have livestock like goats, rabbits, bees or chickens you need to position them in accordance with your city’s regulations. We don’t want to break the rules and spoil the opportunity to raise food in your backyard.
No rules? Sweet, lucky you! I recommend putting the animals in an easy access from your home so when the weather is bad you can still tend to them. I love having my chicken coop right near the garden and my composters. I can dump the er dumps in the composter without having to wheelbarrow it clear over the other side of the property.
The Kitchen Garden
Your vegetable garden needs plenty of sunlight and convenient access to water. You can grow in raised beds or straight in the ground, if you don’t have that option, consider planters and containers on patios, decks and vertical gardening in trellis, baskets, rain gutters and other ways to grow more in your space.
Some easy to to grow vegetables to try in your first vegetable garden:
- zucchini
- radishes
- lettuce
- chard
- spinach
- spring onions / scallions
- tomatoes
- winter squash
- beans
You can also add easy herbs like basil, chives, cilantro (coriander), thyme and parsley to your kitchen garden and add to your delicious home cooked meals.
Consider getting transplants for your first year of peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, strawberries and squash they are easier than seeds, especially if you are busy.
Learn more about starting a garden in these posts:
- How to Start a Vegetable Garden From Scratch in 6 Easy Steps
- How to Choose Vegetables to Grow
- Grow More Food With Keyhole Garden Beds
- The Frugal Organic Garden
- How to Grow Potatoes in Tires
The Orchard & Fruit Garden
You can add fruit to a sunny location in your yard or dedicate a garden bed to soft fruits like raspberries, strawberries and blackberries and grow the canes up a trellis. You can even grow fruit in containers on patios including cordon fruit trees!
Dwarf fruit trees allow you to grow more in your space and using permaculture fruit tree guild planting techniques will let you grow even more by squeezing in more edibles around the tree planting areas.
If you have a bigger yard, think about putting your fruit trees and orchard in with your poultry pen or in your pasture area for the bigger livestock. If you are able to do this, you must protect your young trees from your browsing livestock so they can get established properly.
Read more about fruit to grow and orchards in these posts:
- 40 Brilliant Berries to Grow
- Permaculture Chicken Yard
- Designing a Backyard Permaculture Orchard
- How to Plant a Fruit Tree Guild
Compost
Composting is how organic gardeners can grow a great garden. Good quality compost feeds the soil and your garden and should be added to your orchard and vegetable garden areas each year. The great thing about composting is that it is recycling nutrients from your home into the garden and avoids losing those nutrients into the city dump.
Small backyards can use composters with a small footprint and I love tumbling composters
in my suburban homestead. These work great on small homesteads because they cut down on any smells and flies which might upset the neighbors or ruin your garden party, they don’t need a lot of space to turn the compost and can fit against a wall. Tumbling composters also can be animal proof and the aluminium Jora composter
is great for keeping any critters out and is my favorite tumbling composter out of the two that I have.
If you don’t like tumbling composters you can get a traditional compost bin
, the plastic ones work well to keep everything contained and lidded ones will keep the smells and flies down. They can look neat and tidy in one section of your yard and I’ve seen people build a trellis to screen their composters and put that trellis to use by growing scented climbers like roses or jasmine. You can use the trellis to grow a climber like kiwi, passionflower or grapes to screen your composters with something edible and get even more food our of your growing space.
Compost even more from your kitchen by usingBokashi composting
and put those meat, fish, dairy and bones to use and turn it into compost. Your compost will have more nutrients in it that composting just the stuff out of the garden or animal pens.You can add the Bokashi fermented materials to your regular compost bin or even your tumbling composter.
If you don’t have space for a regular composter or a tumbling composter, you can still compost with a worm bin
with the advantage that the worms make a concentrated liquid fertilizer as well as worm castings that make your garden grow beautifully. Worm bins stack and have a very small footprint and can be used on patios, balconies and even in an apartment. There are also composting towers which can look like a beautiful focal point in your small space like theEcoRich teracotta composter
.
Medicinal Herb Garden
For many homesteaders, the herb garden is often separated from the rest of the garden in a herb spiral or a separate garden bed. In a small space you can grow your medicinal herbs in containers, hanging baskets, front yard or blend it with your vegetable garden and take a leaf from French potagers and country gardens filled with veggies and herbs growing together.
Many homesteaders grow lots of herbs to use as medicine in their small properties, some herbs you might want to try growing include:
- thyme
- comfrey
- mint
- chamomile
- echniacea
Many herbs can be great food for your bees and can be used in the kitchen.
Preserving Food
A well stocked larder of home preserved foods is like a homesteader’s trophy and if you want to have the same thing, you really can even when trying to homestead on less than an acre. If you cannot grow enough produce to eat fresh and preserve, think outside the box: can you buy it on sale from the store? How about a local fruit stand or the Farmer’s Market? If you buy in bulk, you can preserve to use it later in the year.
Some methods to preserve your homestead produce include canning (bottling, pickling, jams, chutney, preserves etc), dehydrating, freeze drying and freezing. Many fruits and vegetables may be stored in a root cellar and before you think that you need a hobbit house for a root cellar, you can create a mini root cellar for roots like carrots, parsnips, beets, turnips but also potatoes, onions, cabbages, apples and other vegetables and fruit by digging a large hole in the ground which you have easy access to in winter and sinking a garbage can, barrel or drum into. You need your root cellar to be lidded to keep critters out and you can insulate it with straw. Add your veggies and place the lid on top then cover with straw and mark where your root cellar is!
Bury your barrel at an angle for easier access to your veggies and if you have a window well, you can turn that into a root cellar!
Learn more about preserving food in these posts:
- National Center for Home Food Preservation
- Trash Can Root Cellar
- Window Well Root Cellar
- Preserving Your Harvest
- Canning Mistakes: How to Not Get Caught with Your Pants Down When Canning Season Arrives
Apiary & Bees
I love bee-ing a beekeeper :D, they really are fascinating creatures and help to pollinate your garden meaning bigger harvests. My hive is located in accordance with my city’s regulations but if I were to have a choice, I would put my hive out in the permaculture orchard area as this sees much less traffic in the garden and I don’t have to mow it. Right now, as I mow the lawn I get right in my bee’s flight path and then the ladies are fully laden with pollen and nectar they are a bit miffed that I’m in the way of their landing board.
My city requires an onsite source of water and we have a steel feed trough we converted to be a small pond complete with water lilies and goldfish. The pond brings lots of different bees to my yard for water and I would move this to the orchard area too. The orchard area is densely planted with lots of flowers for food for the bees and is semi shaded so the hive does not get too hot in the summer.
Find out more about beekeeping in these posts:
- Installing a Package of Bees: the Tools and Prep You NEED Before They Arrive
- Beekeeping Mistakes
- Free Bees! How to Build Swarm Traps and Bait Hives
- Thinking About Bees?
Small Livestock
Small livestock on a small homestead means rabbits, chickens, ducks and quail. Raising livestock at home is a great opportunity for us to connect with where our food comes from and sometimes, it really isn’t easy.
I raise chickens on my suburban homestead and they have kept us in eggs pretty well although we have had problems in out backyard flock, it is important to know that this is part of the learning process and there are things you will get wrong as a homesteader.
Our coop in positioned in line with the city’s rules and I have started trees around the coop to provide more shade and to provide more food with herbs and fruit for them to forage on.I recently purchasedRaising Meat Chickensto learn more about rearing some meat birds for the last part of the summer to provide meat for the freezer. I learned so much from watching this honest walk through of raising meat chickens at home and for me, raising meat birds just isn’t right for my homestead and working schedule.
Rabbits are something we are looking hard at after watching Grow Your Own Groceriesand maybe what we move into next year. My city has a cap on how many chickens and rabbits you can have at any one time and we are still discussing our home-reared meat options including quail, rabbits and the quiet muscovy ducks.
Research is a homesteader’s friend and you should really look into what you can have in your area, what numbers you are able to keep, housing limitations and regulations (some cities will not allow you to heat the coop because of the fire risk and have run limitations). You should take a look on YouTube for how to raise the animals and cull them if necessary and how to process the animal and preserve it.
Learn more about keeping small livestock in these posts:
- 8 Practical Livestock Options for Urban Homesteads
- Best Backyard Chicken Breeds for Suburban Homesteads
- The Nitty Gritty Basics of Raising Quail
- Colony Raising Rabbits
- Best Tips for Raising Ducks
- Raising Chickens in Your Backyard
- Cannibalism in Backyard Chickens
- Winterizing the Chicken Coop a Year Later
- How to Insulate a Prefabricated Chicken Coop
- How to Winterize a Chicken Coop for Free
- Chicken Coop Review: Precision Old Red Barn
Bigger Livestock
If you have the room for goats or pigs and you are able to have them, that is AWESOME! You need to be aware that bigger animals need more feed and make more poop and you have to muck them out regularly to keep things hygienic and to practice good sanitation when handling the animals or their homes. Their manure can be composted and used in the garden areas and they will ultimately provide you with meat and milk in the case of goats.
Your fencing needs to be robust, you do not want your goats across town munching on the city’s flower garden to your pig wandering into the neighbor’s kitchen.
Do your homework before you dive in. Visit local keepers of the animals you plan on getting (check out Facebook groups as a resource) and learn about the rules for transport, licensing, vaccinations, feed, how many you need to keep, do you need to breed them to keep producing milk and find out about bills, the cost of keeping the animals.
Learn if you need to take the animals to an abattoir or slaughterhouse for processing or you can do it onsite. Research how you cull the animal and how to process and dispose of it.
Learn about livestock in these posts:
In Summary: How To homestead On Less Than An Acre
A blank canvas in a typical English backyard!
You really can homestead on less than an acre and there are lots of people who do around the world. No two homesteads will be the same and you can get incredibly creative in the space you have!
Be sure to do your homework and research before you dive in and bring home those 2 goats and that donkey and work within the regulations for your area. There are often groups working to change regulations and you can get involved with those groups in your town to help make the changes to start your homesteading journey where you currently live.
Plan where you want your garden and animals to be located, you can combine growing food and raising animals together in the same space. Maximize the space you have by growing vertical on trellis or wall planters, get creative in the space you have and start composting to feed your soil and garden with the waste you are already generating.
Homesteading is exciting and fun but can also be tough and a lot of work especially if you are still working but being able to homestead in the suburbs or the city has so many advantages like being close to medical care for your or your livestock, having water direct to your home and nearby stores for food and gardening supplies. What’s stopping you from trying to connect with the land you already have and start to homestead on less than an acre today?
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