I had fun today drawing this little map. As per convention, north is on top.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
I chose a 50×60 m rectangle because it allowed me to get exactly 3000 m², unlike a 54×54 m square (and drawing meters to a decimal point is pure nonsense). And whereas a square would, theoretically, need the least amount of fencing, the difference is just 4 m overall.
There is a logic behind all these placements and orientations, and I will talk about them in subsequent posts. In this one, I will talk a bit just about the utility buildings.
The buildings are positioned around a small front yard and close to each other, so a person can easily move between them when needed, and the walkways are short enough to clear snow with ease.
A one-story house with a cellar solves one requirement from the “storage” post, and the attic can work as an additional storage space for junk, as is usually the case. I store electric gardening tools in mine when not in use. 10×8 m would be plenty of space for one person, which is what this whole mental exercise is about.
The toolshed, workshop, and garage form one big unit. And the storage barn is as close to the house as it is to the toolshed and the workshop. The garage is 6×6 m, which should be big enough not only for a car, but also for, as previously mentioned, a small tractor, a lawnmower, a verticutter, and assorted accessories.
Does anything else happen in the coppices?
Are there some shade-tolerant plants you could grow there?
I’ve been following this series out of curiosity. One interesting thing is the Northern thinking. When my sister was in the Peace Corps in the tropics, an indispensable feature was the tilapia pond. They survive utterly horrific water quality, and they built rabbit and chicken enclosures above the ponds to provide organic matter. Tilapia are an incredibly efficient way to recycle small animal waste into more protein. While they are pretty robust, they are not an option in your neck of the woods.
i don’t have anything useful to say but i want to encourage you to continue because this is fun.
DrVanNostrand @2 for some reason* fish culture fell out of use in northern Europe. I don’t know how widespread it was, but in the UK medieval manors, monasteries and nunneries built fish ‘ponds’ if they didn’t have access to river, lake or sea fish. You can still see some converted to purely ornamental use or when dried out as sunken gardens or simply large sunken rectangles.
* In the UK the most obvious reason would be our mass conversion from Roman Catholicism on Henry VIII’s orders, and the consequent abandoning of ‘fast’ days and therefore the fish required to substitute for meat.
@chigau, I will write about the possible uses of coppice when I write abut it specifically.
@DrVanNostrand, as you probably guessed, the nordcentricity is due to my rl location.
@Bébé Mélange, I am glad you like it. It is a bit silly, and at the same time, a bit useful mental exercise.
@Jazzlet, a fishpond would take up a lot of space if it were to be useful, so it would only make sense to have one if it were already present as a natural feature of the plot of land.
Realizing that this is a very schematic map, still, I’m wondering about placement. At the west side, I assume from placement of the garage, is access by road or driveway, but if by road, getting the tractor and mower, etc. back into the property could be a little tricky. If it’s a driveway or right of way, ore even a rural dirt road, no problem, but if it’s a traveled road, you might want to find a way to set the garage back from the property line enough so that vehicles can exit without immediately passing into the road. Or cut off the bottom left corner of Coppice 1, and have the driveway come in there.
Of course if this is all speculative and no lot yet exists, you’ll end up having to adjust a few details anyway, probably including lot size and shape, but somehow I think access to the garage needs attention.
@Mathew Currie, that is a good point; it depends on what you mean by a tractor. I mean a single-axle walking tractor that could, together with the lawnmower, etc., move into the property directly through a side door at the south side, into the orchard. If one were to have a bigger vehicle in mind, then another placement would probably be wiser and wider paths than 2 m would be needed.
I had to modify the map (I will write about that in the next post), because it turns out, it has a huge flaw -- 3000m2 is not enough for what I had in mind.
Yes, for a two wheel tractor, or even a lawn tractor, a side or back door would be fine. When I was traveling in the last couple of years I saw a lot of these in Asia. I don’t think the big Yanmars are available over here, but they are quite popular there, especially because they can be fitted with special steel wheels to use in rice paddies, and in between tilling jobs you can set them up as pumps. Long long ago I saw similar ones in Switzerland. You’d see farmers riding these up the steep alpine roads, pulling a big trailer, only going about 5 miles an hour, but steadily.
Alas, I don’t think quite as robust a machine is readily available over here. I used to have an old Gravely, which is like the little brother of those, but it wasn’t terribly well balanced and it was geared too fast for some jobs like tilling. Beautifully made machine, but a little like a Shopsmith, it was capable of doing many things, but none of them optimally.
I see if you’re willing to take a chance, you can get some pretty impressive looking Chinese ones from Ali Baba.
You made me look into lawn tractors. There are some with a plough attachment. That would be even better for a plot this size than a two-wheel tractor -- working with a two-wheel tractor is still hard and exhausting.
Charly the regular peasants in the UK wouldn’t have had a fish pond, it was very much the purview of the well-to-do. There were also limits on who could fish natural waters because they were all owned by the landed. Peasants generally just went without on fast days unless they were lucky enough to have a licence to fish eels or had cheese.
Friends of mine who are partially self-sufficient have a mini tractor that they got second-hand from Japan. I don’t know if it is still the case, but when they were looking ( some years ago) the Japanese Government subsidised the purchase of these small tractors to such an extent, that most farmers got a new one about every three years and there was a thriving trade in shipping the second-hand ones all over the place. I think they were specifically designed for use on small plots, but they could do all the things a big tractor like drilling post holes etc with the right attachments, but obviously with less power. I don’t think it was a Yanmar, I seem to think it was smaller than they are.