I’m actually on my first year of sort of doing this. I wouldn’t say I made bank, but I make enough that I could buy a house with an acre and an adjacent partially wooded lot with another acre that I’ll hopefully be able to split between crops and some livestock in the next few years. For now I’m starting small with 1/8th of an acre and just growing the same stuff we always grew in the garden but on a bigger scale plus a few rows of corn and a patch of sunflowers.
My company doesn’t care when I do my work so I can spend half the day in the field no problem and clock a couple hours at night, as long as I get something done no one bothers me.
It’s been extra cool because the house is an original farmhouse from the early 1900s with an original barn, water lines and even power running out there too so being able to fix everything up myself and bring the land back to it’s original glory has really brought something much needed back into my soul.
I will say thought it is fucking expensive even after buying the land.
Oh we do, we have a little bit of woods, but right next to us there’s about a 20 acre thick woods that’s owned by one of our neighbors and basically treated as communal. A couple of the neighbors help out to maintain a trail that they made running next to a small stream. We just found out the whole woods is filled with various flowers in the spring/summer. Right now all the daffodils are absolutely covering everything but the trail so the owners posted on Facebook inviting anyone to come walk the trail and pick as many as they want. It was really cool to see so many people from the community come to this private land that’s treated as public, maintained for free by the neighbors just for the sake of having something nice, to pick flowers for free without any expectation of anything in return. Talk about icing in the cake, we had no clue about any of this before we moved in. I assumed it was a grumpy old guy who like living in the woods so people wouldn’t bother him, instead it’s a young couple with a baby who invite strangers in for tea.
I tried fixing up cars a couple years back but it turns out that’s just not my jam. I was a framing carpenter for a few years so my expertise outside of wood and nails is pretty limited. But with the price of things nowadays I’m getting not too shabby with plumbing and electrical. Replaced a couple pipes when we first moved in and I’m working on slowly swapping out some old knob and tube with romex, although it takes me forever because I’ll check everything 20, times and redo it if it’s not absolutely perfect, electrical stuff makes me nervous.