I had to do some math, and I realized that my previous garden plan does not add up. I knew that I needed to have at least 500 m2 fields, with 100 m²”other”, but I could not fit that into the 3000 m² available. I thought slightly smaller fields would still work, but when I calculated the calories that can be produced in this area, I found it lacking. My initial estimation was wrong; 3000 m² is just not enough. There are two main reasons for this:
- When making the initial estimate, I grossly underestimated how much space would be taken by the buildings and the paths between them.
- I completely forgot the sewage cleaning facility, which takes up somewhere around 70 m².
And since the point of this exercise is not to make it work with 3000 m² but to find an area that would work, I enlarged the plot to 3300 m² by adding five meters in the south.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
This allowed me to keep the sewage cleaning facility at almost the same size, to enlarge the five fields into 100 m², and add some raised beds for additonal crops to what would be grown in the fields. And now, after uploading it, I notice that I forgot to correct a typo. I won’t bother correcting it; have fun finding it, if you haven’t already.
In the next post, I will write in detail about how to use the coppice.
this is like siggy’s video game but not on da moon.
this here: https://freethoughtblogs.com/atrivialknot/2026/01/30/my-game-released/
I thought it was “Orc herd” until I realised that is a problem with my eyesight not your spelling.
If you cut out the top half (removing almost all of the coppice), it’s kind of like the old property plot my father’s family used to own. Same size, shape and east-west orientation.
I’ve mentioned that house and garden before. My ancestors originally rented (and later bought) the plot from a local small farmer in the 1910s when the area was being developed from forest/pasture to a residential neighborhood. It was an early suburban working class neighborhood, and the large plots were meant to allow some substantial level of local food production while people also had jobs in the nearby town. No coppice was needed, since you could get cheap scrap wood from the sawmill to use for firewood and even construction material.
The early residents in that neighborhood must have done an incredible amount of work clearing the land, building houses and outbuildings and so on. The soil there was not very good -- full of stones and generally sloping toward north. People grew lots of potatoes, planted apple trees, kept pigs and gradually imported soil improvement materials. Some kept a cow and rented land from nearby pasture. The whole area was initially best accessible by boat, so everyone had boats and fishing for household use was popular.
Over time, most of the land on our plot and the neighboring plots was converted to struggling lawns, poorly managed orchards and wild thickets. When I was a kid and teen, potato cultivation and fishing were being phased out. Our pigsty had long ago been converted to a garage. There were old outbuildings full of stuff like fish nets and old hand tools, some of the latter quite ancient looking. For city kids -- including but not limited to myself -- it was like a mini farm. Heating was mainly electric, but we still used firewood, most of it bought. In the last years, when I was an adult, we hired someone to fell a couple big trees and help chop them up. I trimmed the smaller trees and shrubs, and tried to keep the ever-spreading thicket at bay. Sometimes I wondered how much firewood we could grow if most of the plot was converted into a coppice-like woodland.
That might be a dumb question but is it a good idea to have the sewage cleaning area just besides the food growing fields? Or is it totally irrelevant or even beneficial? As you can tell from the question, I am totally ignorant on this.
@Jean, the placement of the sewage cleaning facility is perfectly safe. I have a similarly sized sewage cleaning facility on my property. I wrote about it in last year’s gardening posts -click-. The discharge water is safe to water my vegetables, and it is also safe to discharge directly into the soil just about 30 m from my well (legally).
Not to mention that nature is very good at dealing with shit. I will write a bit more about it when writing a post specifically about the sewage cleaning facility.