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Being near family is a huge plus. If you could manage to find a place on Kauai that would be good. Do they have any place you can stay while looking for a place? It is almost impossible to find the proper spot from the mainland. You can find "a" spot, but it won't be the best one unless you've been here awhile to even know what to look for.
A lot of food can be grown on a town sized lot. Also, if you do buy somewhere with no soil, you can still do raised bed gardens for home vegetables. We've put one in even though we have soil since it's easier to reach the garden when it's raised. This garden was started the first of this year so this is a two month old garden: [IMG][/IMG]
It is nine by six or so and just stacked concrete blocks with some topsoil mixed with half composted chipped trees and a lot of half composted bunny manure. We're already getting beans and beets out of it. The watermelon has already escaped the garden (which is what it was supposed to do) and the tomatoes which were planted from seed are coming up nicely in the back. This is terribly over planted, but we didn't have much space and it gets watered a lot as well as Bunny Berry Tea added about every two weeks. Other than this little garden, there are mature tangerine, orange, grapefruit, papaya, banana, lemon, peach, and assorted culinary herbs. So we do get a lot of food from the yard even though we don't have a very big yard. We just moved to this house a year ago but there have been a lot of other fruit trees planted, too. Almonds, pear, apple, cherry, peach, blackberry, boysenberry and cinnamon. (Check into "low chill varieties" when choosing what trees to plant in Hawaii) There is a lot of edible landscape here even though we aren't a farm. We also have three hens and two hutches of rabbits in the back yard, they are good "livestock" for town since they produce without making noise or smells.
The other thing with being in town is you don't have to go far to get supplies and if there is extra, you don't have to go far to find someone to sell it to. Part of the problem with farmer's markets is the getting to town (gas is currently just under $5 a gallon) and then paying to have a table at the farmer's market. That's frequently around $20. So, $20 to get to the market, $20 for the table and you're down by $40 before even starting. Figure there are some sort of production costs involved with getting the produce on the table and the market is only open for six hours or so. How much do you have to sell to be profitable? Some folks are doing CSA which is "Community Supported Agriculture" and usually involves a weekly produce basket which is signed up for and pre-paid at the beginning of the season. If you do get acreage, market lamb might be something to look into. Woolly sheep breeds also have fleeces which can be sold and there is a small fiber industry starting up around here.
A processing facility for other folk's produce might be a good agricultural thing to start up. I think that can be put on ag land, too, which would keep the taxes low.
Do you have much experience in farming or extensive gardening?
That's a very nice garden hotzcatz. My wife wanted some raised beds, and I hadn't thought to do them with cinder blocks. Instead, I'm making her a gutter-garden, with 2 10-foot plastic gutters supported on what is essentially a long saw-horse.
Gutter gardens are good, although they need to be tended more frequently since they can dry out quickly. I've seen somewhere that a greenhouse had gutter gardens on a revolving track so they were able to pick and tend strawberries without having to be at ground level. Maybe you could have a self irrigation system of some type to keep it moist? If there's no wind, though, it wouldn't dry out as quick, too. The next garden here will be three blocks high and a four block high garden would be lovely. It would take a lot of compost/top soil to fill, though. It can be intensively planted and aggressively fertilized (need more bunnies!) so it can grow the same amount as a much larger "regular" garden would. Probably takes less water and fertilizer overall since none of it is going into the "between the rows" area since there isn't any area between the rows.
When folks are "looking for acreage" I sometimes wonder if they've actually had acreage before or if they just like the idea of acreage. If there is a reason for it, such as grazing critters, then acreage can be a good thing. Having an acre sized garden is a HUGE amount of work. If all they want to do is to feed a family, a much smaller garden would do. Put it on a smaller lot, less expensive house, easier to pay for, more comfortable lifestyle all around. There is a certain size of garden required to support a farmer's market table. Hmm, I wonder how many raised beds I'd need to support a farmer's market table? The markets are usually only once a week, so there'd be two harvests of whatever is planted. Beans, beets/beet greens, tomatoes produce high value crops in a small space. A town sized lot aggressively landscaped with edibles and with an assortment of raised beds might feed the family with leftovers for the market. Maybe one raised bed for each crop? Hmm. Probably need a paper and calendar to figure it all out. It would be closer to the market, and less work to take care of than a huge regular garden, IMHO.
I have some friends on a really lovely five acre "homestead" and he spends almost all his time mowing the lawn. Why it was never fenced with critters to eat the grass is beyond me. Sheep, alpaca, even donkeys, just something to keep the grass down. They are too tenderhearted to grow market lambs, but maybe they could have been growing alpaca for fiber all this time. Their five acres has been an expense with no production of anything. They are also twenty minutes away from any town or village and folks don't visit them often and the expense of driving everywhere (they get bored staying at home) is becoming expensive for them. They are elderly and on a fixed income and being far away from medical facilities has been a bit of a problem as well.
Gutter gardens are good, although they need to be tended more frequently since they can dry out quickly. I've seen somewhere that a greenhouse had gutter gardens on a revolving track so they were able to pick and tend strawberries without having to be at ground level. Maybe you could have a self irrigation system of some type to keep it moist? If there's no wind, though, it wouldn't dry out as quick, too. The next garden here will be three blocks high and a four block high garden would be lovely. It would take a lot of compost/top soil to fill, though. It can be intensively planted and aggressively fertilized (need more bunnies!) so it can grow the same amount as a much larger "regular" garden would. Probably takes less water and fertilizer overall since none of it is going into the "between the rows" area since there isn't any area between the rows.
When folks are "looking for acreage" I sometimes wonder if they've actually had acreage before or if they just like the idea of acreage. If there is a reason for it, such as grazing critters, then acreage can be a good thing. Having an acre sized garden is a HUGE amount of work. If all they want to do is to feed a family, a much smaller garden would do. Put it on a smaller lot, less expensive house, easier to pay for, more comfortable lifestyle all around. There is a certain size of garden required to support a farmer's market table. Hmm, I wonder how many raised beds I'd need to support a farmer's market table? The markets are usually only once a week, so there'd be two harvests of whatever is planted. Beans, beets/beet greens, tomatoes produce high value crops in a small space. A town sized lot aggressively landscaped with edibles and with an assortment of raised beds might feed the family with leftovers for the market. Maybe one raised bed for each crop? Hmm. Probably need a paper and calendar to figure it all out. It would be closer to the market, and less work to take care of than a huge regular garden, IMHO.
I have some friends on a really lovely five acre "homestead" and he spends almost all his time mowing the lawn. Why it was never fenced with critters to eat the grass is beyond me. Sheep, alpaca, even donkeys, just something to keep the grass down. They are too tenderhearted to grow market lambs, but maybe they could have been growing alpaca for fiber all this time. Their five acres has been an expense with no production of anything. They are also twenty minutes away from any town or village and folks don't visit them often and the expense of driving everywhere (they get bored staying at home) is becoming expensive for them. They are elderly and on a fixed income and being far away from medical facilities has been a bit of a problem as well.
Thanks for the ideas hotzcatz. Yes, we're planning an irrigation system for the gutter garden, we got the idea from a neighbor. You have a barrel under the gutters, with a small fountain pump on a timer. Then you raise one end of the gutters a bit, pump water to the high end and collect it at the low end and send it back to the barrel. Run the pump twice a day or as needed. I'm also thinking of just putting the pump on a solar panel, but that might lead to too much evaporation with the water circulating all day.
I suppose then I need fish in the barrel to eat mosquito larvae, and before you know it, we have reinvented aquaculture.
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