← Start: planning your homestead H00-05 · Module 5 of 7 · Pages: 21 · Worksheets: 7

Time and money: what a homestead demands

How many hours a week and how many pounds a garden, orchard, hens, bees or goats take, what the homestead gives back and how to stay within your limits

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Whole series: Start: planning your homestead, €39

Time and money: what a homestead demands

In short

  • Roughly: vegetable garden 0.035 hours per m² a week, a hen 0.15 hours, a goat 2 hours. A 100 m² garden (about 1,100 sq ft) takes about 3.5 hours a week in season.
  • Plan for no more than 80 % of your free time. The rest is a buffer for breakdowns, rain and a harvest that all comes at once.
  • In the busiest weeks (May, September) you need 1.5 times the average.
  • Invest from savings, without loans, and keep 10–15 % of the budget in reserve.
  • In money per hour a homestead rarely beats a paid job. Its value lies in food quality, security and health.

What's inside

Chapters

  1. The two currencies of a homestead
  2. How many hours each area takes
  3. How much time you really have
  4. What it costs to get started
  5. Running costs every year
  6. What the homestead gives back
  7. How to cut hours and costs
  8. Reserve, risk and borrowing
  9. Most common mistakes
  10. Printable checklist

Worksheets

  • Hours in season calculator
  • Set-up cost calculator
  • Running costs calculator
  • Food value calculator
  • Money and work calendar
  • Hours and costs record
  • Annual reckoning

Fields and checkboxes can be filled in with Adobe Acrobat Reader (desktop and mobile), and the calculator adds up by itself. Filling in may not work in some browsers. A print version comes with the screen PDF.

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