Interactive lesson

Land assessment, step by step

Interactive lesson: read a plot before you buy it or dig the first spade — water, soil, sun and frost, access, risks and paperwork.

Free sample Chapters 1 and 2 (8 steps) are free. The full lesson comes with the Land assessment module. Already bought? Unlock

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The whole lesson as text

1. Goal first

Before you look at a single listing, write down what you want to produce.

Write down what you want — Garden, hens, fruit trees, goats or hay — that decides how much land, and what kind, you need.
Vegetables and potatoes — Vegetables for the whole year, incl. stored and preserved: about 56 m² per person. Potatoes: about 32 m² per person.
Hens and goats — 10 hens with a run: about 100 m². A goat or sheep: 0.1–0.15 ha per head.
Less, but fully worked — A plot of 1,000–2,000 m² (a quarter to half an acre) can feed a family with vegetables, eggs and fruit. Less land that you fully work is better.

Why: A family that wants a vegetable garden, hens and a few fruit trees needs very different land from a family that wants goats, hay and woodland for firewood. Buying first and planning later is the most common reason for disappointment.

Always ask for the area as shown on the title plan or deed, not “about five acres”.
1 hectare = 10,000 m² ≈ 2.47 acres; 1 acre ≈ 4,047 m².

2. Water

Water is criterion number one: without reliable water in summer there is no garden and no livestock.

Where summer water comes from — Mains, spring, well, stream or rainwater — for each, check what it gives in summer and who has the right to it.
Bucket and stopwatch — A 10-litre bucket filled in 1 minute means about 14,000 litres a day. Ten minutes means only 1,440 litres.
Measure in August — Not in April, when everything flows. If you can't wait, ask at least two neighbours when the spring last ran dry.
What the homestead needs — On a summer day about 120 litres per person, 3–5 litres per m² of garden, 0.3 litres per hen, 5–8 litres per goat.

Why: Summers are getting drier, and springs and shallow wells that used to run all year now fail more often in August. So first establish where the water will come from in the driest week of the year.

Check who else uses the spring and whether livestock graze above it.
Rainwater from the roof helps, but without a large tank it won't carry you through summer — most of it falls in winter.