I’ve been working through the details of my one-acre whole-plant-based homestead, and I’ve reached the point where I can finally start answering one of the biggest questions:
Will everything I need to grow actually fit?
I’ve been taking the Daily Dozen one category at a time and turning my daily needs into yearly amounts, then into crops, yields, seed-saving space, and ultimately square footage.
And the numbers are looking surprisingly good.
My annual crop field, including the additional space needed for saving my own seed, comes to about 5,340 square feet. Add my perennial herb and rhubarb bed, asparagus, fruit trees, berries, grapes, hazelnuts, and walnut, and the entire food-producing portion of the homestead comes to roughly 8,300 square feet—about 0.19 acre.
Then there is the practical side of the homestead: my 12-by-36-foot home, greenhouse, well, water storage, compost and fertility area, and septic reserve.
Even with those included, I’m using only about 10,200 square feet of the acre.
An acre contains 43,560 square feet.
That leaves roughly 33,300 square feet—about three-quarters of the property—still available for the driveway, access, outdoor space, defensible space, landscaping, and simply having some room around the homestead.
That was a pretty exciting discovery.
All of the food production I’ve been planning for my whole-plant-based lifestyle doesn’t require anywhere near the entire acre.
But there’s another reality check coming.
I’m one older female.
Fitting the homestead onto an acre is one thing.
Managing it is another.
I’ve now reached the part of the planning process where I need to figure out exactly what this will look like in real life. When do I plant everything? When will it be ready to harvest? What needs to be preserved? When do I save seed? When do I work on the soil? And how much of all of this has to be done in the same week?
Because knowing that something fits on an acre doesn’t tell me whether it fits into my life.
So that’s where I’m headed next: turning this big plan into a monthly and weekly schedule.
I want to see the actual rhythm of the homestead—not just the square footage.
Because the goal isn’t simply to prove that I can grow all this food on one acre.
The goal is to find out whether I can live this whole-plant-based, increasingly self-sufficient life and actually having the energy to do it and enjoy doing it.
Turning a One-Acre Dream Into a Plan.
