March 22, 2025
Day 1,268 of the Adventure
Would you live here? Many of us dream of such a place for our entire lives. We see these little enticing pictures all the time on social media, and honestly, most of them are not practical. Actually, most of them are not even real. Most are nothing more than an artificial intelligence generated image. I have my own fundamental problems with that, but in the spirit of the idea behind the image, then yes, I would live there! Nothing about it is real or practical. although it could be. From a point of view of scale, the cabin is too small for anything more than a weekend escape. The entire garden and landscape is not workable for many reasons. Still, the image is that of a peaceful and serene life. So, I'd like to explore the idea behind the idea. What this image really represents is something of a simple and self-sufficient lifestyle. Is anything about this image realistically attainable? Of course it is. Not only that, it's also much more possible than what many of us think it could be. A couple years ago, I published a book called "
Back to the Land". In it, there was a chapter dedicated to whether or not, one acre of land would be sufficient for building a small self-sufficient homestead upon. For reference, one acre is roughly 208 ft by 208 feet. In that context, the large garden are we have at out backwoods place is about one eighth of an acre. I was planning to fence off an entire acre but once measuring it out, it was too enormous for a garden plot. If I flagged the corners of one acre, I had enough room for a huge garden, greenhouse, regular house, utility building, fruit tree orchard and more.
My point is that a one-acre plot of land is enough to create a dream environment upon. In the picture of our garden, you can see raised beds, a 10x20 hoop style greenhouse along with 5,000 watts of solar panel collector capacity. The rest of the solar equipment takes up less than 20 square feet of space in a utility shed. Remember that our garden is only about 1/8 of an acre, and you can really only see about half of it in this picture. Our cabin area takes up about a quarter acre and that includes the cabin, utility building and immediate area around the cabin for parking cars, the tractor, firepit, picnic tables and other stuff you would typically find around a backwoods cabin. So that brings us up to still under a half-acre space if it were added to the garden space.
Even though we are stretched out on twelve acres total, almost all of it is just woods. Most of that we haven't even done anything with other than hike around on foraging for mushrooms when they are in season. The twelve acres allowed us to spread ourselves out and cover a larger footprint for our little homestead. If needed, however, we could easily have fit all of it onto a one-acre plot, Or even a half-acre for that matter. I'm saying all this because it's much more easy to imagine a place that fits a modest budget, skills and/or income level than most people can give themselves credit for. I apologize for making this article sound like it's all about us and our dream of a quiet and serene cabin in the woods. My intention is really to give the readers hope that a similar dream is within the grasp of any and all of those who would want to pursue a life such as this. I challenge you to open yourselves to the realistic possibilities of this dream. Ask yourself the question........ Would You Live Here?
Adventure Quote: “Man often becomes what he believes himself to be. If I keep on saying to myself that I cannot do a certain thing, it is possible that I may end by really becoming incapable of doing it. On the contrary, if I have the belief that I can do it, I shall surely acquire the capacity to do it even if I may not have it at the beginning.” ― Mahatma Gandhi
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