Waiting for the property settlement gives me time to dream and plan -there’s seven weeks to go….  I’ve never lived anywhere but in a suburban house before, so thinking about what I could do on 15 acres of land is both exciting and daunting. For some people this probably seems a very small land holding, but for me it seems huge!

So far, things I have thought about doing are:

• Build a hen house to keep chickens (next step is to research chicken breeds)
• Possibly keep ducks and geese as well  (the dam is large enough, I think).
• Put in a vegetable garden and greenhouse so we can have year round vegies and herbs
• Maybe have an alpacca or two as the research I’m doing says they keep foxes away
• Put in more water tanks to help drought-proof the vegie garden
• Establishing a worm farm to produce fertiliser for the vegie garden and use up scraps from the kitchen. (Although maybe the chickens are enough?  I’ll have to to more reading.)

I’m not sure what else we will do, but this seems like a good start.  I’d be interested to hear if anyone has experience of setting up a similar sized property.  Have I overlooked something?  The house is already there, and it is connected to town water, but we want to use tank water for most things if we can.   Apart from growing our own food, we’re basically happy to leave the rest of the land in its natural forested state so the wildlife have somewhere to live too. We hope to sit in our chairs on the verandah and watch the birds.

We’ve just found two books which look helpful “Keeping Chickens: An Australian Guide”  published by Penguin Books, written by Nicolas Brasch   and “Backyard Self-Sufficiency” by Jackie French.   I’ll post a review of both of these in the next few days.  They both look really helpful from a quick flick through the pages.