Mini Farm Plan For Two Acres In The Mountains

Two acre mini farm here we come! We have two acres of land in North Carolina and want to make the most of it. In this post, we’ll share our plan for how we plan to best utilize our two acres.

Growing our own food and raising our own animals has been a dream of ours for a while now, and we’re finally making it happen! In this post, I’ll be sharing

• why having a mini farm and homesteading is so important to us
• what we plan to raise and grow
• how much land each animal will need
• how we will maintain it

Why have a Mini Farm?

Of course we would’ve loved to have more land, but we are so thankful for the two acres we do have and want to make the most of it. Here’s why we are planning our mini farm:

1. We want to grow our own food. There is something about putting the work in to grow your own food, and then the satisfaction that comes with reaping that reward. It helps us eat better and appreciate food more.
   
2. We want to raise our own animals. I’ll never forget how much fun it was the first time we raised baby chicks. My oldest daughter was only 6 months old, and I watched her grow up alongside those chickens. She is an animal lover to the fullest extent, and our others girls have followed suit. Having animals has developed a love and appreciation for them in our children.
   
   We also want to raise our own animals because of the end results. We will know exactly what we are eating and all the hard work that went into it. I think it will really help us appreciate food more.
   
3. The benefits it brings to our family. Raising animals and tending to a garden requires a lot of teamwork. It’s been a great teaching tool for our kids. Our kids have certain farm chores to do, and that will only grow as the mini farm grows. We love giving our kids responsibilities. They don’t always love it, but I’m thankful for what it is teaching them and I think one day they’ll be thankful for it too.
   
4. It’s so fun! Plain and simple, it is just so fun to raise animals and grow a garden. Yes, it is a LOT of work. But working together with our family to raise food and animals is a blast. I love watching my girls get so excited every time they bring in eggs. And watching them eat food right out of the garden just makes me so happy. Developing a love for good and REAL food has been a goal of mine since day one.

The garden plan for our mini farm

We are hoping to have a BIG harvest this year from the garden. It’ll be our first time planting on our property. So far, we have eight raised beds that are 4’x16′. You can see our full garden plan here: Spring Garden Plan. We also have a few fruit trees (pear, apple, and peach), blueberry and blackberry bushes and a grapevine.

There are some deer that travel through our property everyday (which we hunt during season – another source of meat for our family). We have to keep our garden fenced in or it might all be deer food. We will have to do some updating to the garden fence as well as some mending in other areas to make sure we have the protection we need for the crops this year.

Preparing the garden

Next year we hope to make things much more secure with better structure and higher quality fence wire, but for now, a mend here and there will do just fine. Because our composting and soil building programs aren’t established yet, we chose to buy soil and amendments from a big box store to get us rolling for this coming planting season.

We chose an organic raised bed soil as well as some Black Cow soil builder as starters for our beds. These two soils, together, will be a solid foundation for moisture retention and good amounts of organic matter. They will give us the deep root growth we’ll need with our firm, clay, native soils that can be difficult growing mediums.

Raised beds can be much more expensive to start, but here they can be a necessity if we want to grow things like carrots and other root crops with ease. We need to do a little fix here and there to some of our raised bed structures before we can start adding the new soils in. But once all of that’s taken care of we should be in great shape for an abundant Spring garden.

Our Animals (and plan for future animals)

Chickens

We love our chickens! Aside from producing the tastiest eggs ever, they are also a lot of fun for the girls. We have a coop and a good size run that was already built on our property. They also make the best compost that animals can make with their manure. Our chicken coop and run takes up about a 30’x15 spot.

Goats

Who doesn’t want some goats running around? Not only are they cute and fun to have, they also produce milk. It’ll be a whole new ballgame when we are milking every morning, but I’m looking forward to it. Our girls are going to be very entertained by them. We are going to fence about 1/4 of an acre for the goats and plan to breed them and milk them.

Goose

Geese are constantly looking up for aerial predators. We are wanting to raise a goose for flock protection against hawks, eagles, etc. The goose will live with the chicken flock. They also produce eggs seasonally.

Ducks

More birds – yay! Ducks are great egg layers as well as composting machines. We will use their pool water as a liquid fertilizer for the garden and the compost piles. Our girls love to watch them waddle around. We plan to get some ducklings this Spring. They will also live with the chickens.

Pigs

We are hoping to get a pig this Spring! The pigs are of course for the pork. We plan to raise one for ourselves and one to sell. Our hope is that the sale of the second will pay for the feed and time that we put into our own pig. Pigs don’t require much land. We plan to fence a 40’x20′ area to house the two pigs.

Some other animals we are considering are rabbits and bees. We raised rabbits in Florida and weren’t crazy about their meat, but may give it a try again at some point. My husband would also love to have some bees on our property, but there’s A LOT that goes into it and we’re not quite sure what our threshold will be.

Our mini farm mantra – you can do a lot with a little

Our hope is that this post encourages you. We have land that is not flat and we can still do a lot here. Sometimes we tend wait for the perfect farm land to enjoy the farm life. But we’ve realized that farming can happen just about anywhere. It just takes some planning and vision.

At the end of the day, we just want to steward whatever land we have. We want to tend to it and raise our own food and animals as God intended it.

Where are you at in your farm journey? Tell us below!