Starting your own backyard farm or suburban homestead can be a fun and rewarding experience. Imagine having fresh eggs, fruits, and vegetables right from your backyard, raising bees, and creating your own personal food oasis! If you’ve considered it but felt it was impossible due to space, cost, or location, this article offers ideas to ease your mind and help you get started with backyard farming.
In this post
Overcoming Common Concerns
Many people put backyard farming on the back burner due to various concerns. Common worries include:
- Space: “My yard is too small.”
- Cost: “Supplies and gear are too expensive.”
- Feasibility: “It’s not possible where I live.”
These concerns are often surmountable with a bit of planning and creativity.
Really, Your Backyard is Fine
One of the larger concerns most people have about backyard farming is the size of their yard. They wonder if it’s actually possible to grow enough food to make back yard farming worth the effort. The answer is, “Yes!” More and more people are becoming creative about how to grow a huge amount of food in a small space. Planning an edible landscape is doable for most people, as detailed in this article.
Going Vertical
Finding space to farm a larger crop could be as simple as putting your fences to work for you. Rather than growing a decorative ivy, choose a fruit bearing vine. There are many types of vine plants that produce food and could use your fence to grow on. Grapes vines are a good example of this. They also look decorative.
Grow strawberries in raised planters that look similar to gutters. Then grow a plant that thrives in shade beneath them. This increases the amount of food you can grow as well as your variety in produce. Also consider using hanging planters for plants such as tomatoes or peppers.
There are many vertical planters on the market, and some of them are quite budget-friendly, like this one. The Garden Tower is an innovative planter that also provides an area for composting, but it’s quite a bit more expensive, and, of course, there are many other designs between these two options.
Indoor Plants/Outdoor Plants
Backyard homesteading isn’t just confined to the great outdoors. You can also grow indoor plants for homesteading purposes. Choose miniature fruit trees, herbs or edible flowers for indoors. Even something like a tabletop grow kit, like this one, can allow anyone to grow herbs, lettuce and other greens, and small vegetables and is suitable for apartment life.
Save outdoor garden space for larger plants, such as pumpkin or watermelon.
Compost and Neighbor Relations
The sweet smell of compost does not need to drive your neighbors insane. Make sure that during the summer you water your compost down. This will help in the break down process of your compost and helps keep the smell where it belongs.
You can even ask your neighbors to contribute to the compost heap. Grass clippings and raked up leaves are a welcome addition to your decomposing plant pile. Offer to take your neighbors leave and clipping off their hands. As an added bonus you could even offer to rake up the leaves yourself.
By the way, the tumbler style of composter is one that I do not recommend. Another possibility is a worm bin.
Backyard Farming Ideas with Animals
When you think of a farm you don’t just think of plants. You think of chickens, cows, pigs and other livestock. While some of these animals won’t be ideal for being raised in a back yard, other will fit in just fine.
What Animal & Where
You may be thinking that while a garden is possible, animals just aren’t. You live too close to or in a city and they don’t allow animal husbandry. If you feel this way but haven’t check with your local government, you may want to make sure. Read through your town and/or neighborhood Covenants, Conditions, and Restrictions (CC&Rs).
Some cities allow raising chickens, and more and more are jumping on the backyard chickens movement. Others allow you to raise other types of animals as well. Check to see what you local government allows as well as what type of permits and living conditions ( for the animals ) are required.
Rabbits are another meat option for the backyard farm. They need relatively small hutches or pens, multiply rapidly and are inexpensive and quiet.
Bees are another very simple way to expand your backyard farm, and, once established, a hive or two are very easy to care for. In my neighborhood’s HOA documents, bees are not specified in their list of restrictions. Read more about beekeeping for beginners.
Mini May Not Stay Mini
There are many animals that, if normal size you would never try to cram into your back yard. A breeder putting mini in front of the name of an animal doesn’t always change that. You still need to check to see what an adult mini animal will grow into.
Miniature goats and pigs may start out small, but could grow to still be too big to fit in your backyard.
Considering Sound
You don’t need a rooster to have chickens. The only reason to have a rooster would be to fertilize your eggs to produce more chickens. If you are just trying to produce your own eggs, all you need are the chickens.
Roosters are noisy, and while some people like the idea of waking up to the crow of a rooster, other people loathe the idea. Chickens are about as noisy as a barking dog. Geese and ducks are another option some suburban farmers choose — just spend some time around them to determine if the noise will cause problems with the neighbors.
Pro Tips for Backyard Farming
- Start small: Don’t try to do everything at once. Begin with a few plants or chickens and gradually expand.
- Plan your garden: Consider sunlight, soil type, and plant compatibility. You could wing it but may have less success.
- Go vertical: Beyond simple hanging planters, explore more advanced vertical techniques like trellising (for vining plants) and espalier (training fruit trees to grow flat against a wall or fence).
- Learn from others: Talk to experienced gardeners and farmers in your area.
- Harvest Rainwater: Collect rainwater in barrels or other containers for watering your garden. Consider a simple system with a diverter attached to your downspout.
- Be patient: Building a backyard farm takes time and effort. Don’t get discouraged if things don’t go perfectly at first.
- Enjoy the process: Backyard farming should be a fun and rewarding experience.
Saving Money: DIY and Avoiding Unnecessary Purchases
Like many projects, there are new and improved tools, shelters and planting boxes that advertisers will insist are a must. Most of them are not. Some of them may save a little time and effort, but you could save plenty of money making your own.
Animal Shelters
While you can buy a chicken coop online, you can also make one. It would be less expensive. You could also build pens for your goats and other livestock. There are plenty of free plans online to guide you through the process. Here are a few places to look:
- https://www.motherearthnews.com/homesteading-and-livestock/build-a-pigpen-zmaz76n
- www.freechickencoopplans.com
Essential Gardening Tools
People were growing crops thousands of years ago. They did it without the new and improved plow. They walked around with a stick poking holes in the ground, putting seeds into them, and covering them up. While it’s nice to have some of the newer items to farm ( weed eater and edgers are our friends), you don’t need much more than what they used thousand of years ago.
To avoid spending an excess of money on tools and supplies you may end up not using, make a list of so-called “must haves”, ask gardening and farming friends for their opinions, and then just wait to see if these are things that you, personally, will find useful. If the tool doesn’t save you time and/or money, then it’s likely not worth the investment.
FAQs
Research your local regulations regarding animals and gardening, and assess your available space.
Utilize vertical gardening techniques, grow compatible plants together, and consider indoor gardening.
Consider your goals (eggs, meat, or dual-purpose), climate, space, and noise tolerance. Research different breeds and their characteristics. Local feed stores or breeders can also offer advice.
Related Homesteading Content
- One Woman’s Story of Creating (& Loving) A Suburban Homesteading Lifestyle
- First Steps to Setting Up a Micro Homestead
- Beekeeping For Beginners
- How To Plan An Edible Landscape To Grow Even More Food
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Rabbits are another possibility for a backyard farm. Many municipalities and/ or HOAs have regulations as to how many chickens you can have in your backyard, if you can have them at all. Rabbits are a different story. I don’t keep rabbits (yet), but I find the idea extremely intriguing as a low-cost and efficient meat source.
We raised rabbits (as pets) when I was a kid. I loved it, rabbits require very little care, they multiply rapidly, are very inexpensive and very quiet (and extremely cold-tolerant). Our rabbits stayed outdoors in their hutches year-round in the Midwest and did very well in winter. Summer heat and humidity is harder on them. We let them out to play in the grass a lot in the shade and cooled them off with frozen water bottles and lightly misted them to keep them comfy on days over 90 degrees F. I’ve been reading a lot recently about raising rabbits for meat, and I’d like to give it a try later this year, after the summer heat is over. My only obstacle is mental, to get myself ready for butchering and what method will work best for me. Best to get my mind prepared now for difficult things like this, because if TSHTF, there will be much larger hurdles to face.
Rabbits are become harder and harder to care for, as governments have released viruses to control wild populations in certain countries that have regularly decimated meat rabbit populations as well as pet populations. While I’m not personally comfortable with keeping them as meat animals, because I have them as pets, I have no issue with people who keep them for these purposes and treat them humanely in the process (as should be done with any animal). It does require a bit of space though, to maintain a population of meat rabbits – as you want them to grow to a reasonable size before culling, or you’ll get nothing from them. Some climates are better suited than others to housing them outdoors year-round, and one should do a bit of research to ensure that they are appropriately fed as well (you want longevity in your breeders, and quality bulk in your meat rabbits).
Another thing impacting the ease of keeping rabbits is their popularity now as pets, which has seen an increase in “backyard breeding,” which has resulted in far less sturdy specimens, unfortunately. So if one DOES decide to get rabbits for meat – please be sure you know how to treat them right, cull them right, etc, but also make sure you do a bit of research on where you source your rabbits from, so you don’t end up with sickly, weak stock.
Thanks for sharing and giving us valuable information about backyard farming. Growing your own food has gone beyond the hippie counter-culture of the ’60s. Just because you have a small space, it doesn’t mean that you can’t grow a stellar vegetable garden. If you want to learn how to manage small space in a garden then visit this site