My Tiny House Lot & My Big Ideas
Here’s My Little Piece of Self-Reliance
I live at the edge of a city in a small association neighborhood with rules.
We had to get permission to put up our cedar fence after we moved here. I own my house. I bought it right after the 2008 crash in a region where housing was already inexpensive. I paid cash for it.
I’d lived in Maine for 32 years and sold my house after early retirement at age 54 from a career as an educator.
My husband and I then traveled the world for four years, living everywhere but nowhere. We owned almost nothing at the time. No cars, no house, and almost no material possessions. What little we owned, 17 small boxes, were stored in my mother-in-law’s heated garage.
After the birth of our only grandchild, we settled stateside to be near her. She’s now almost 13 years old. We bought our current house from the sale of our home in Maine. We never touched a penny of that money during our vagabonding. That left us $20,000 that we kept in a special account for home expenses like repairs, upgrades, taxes, and insurance. We contribute $400 a month to the house fund. It’s not cheap to own a home.
Our house lot is tiny, around a third of an acre.
That’s counting the land the house sits on. Our 1700 square foot house was built in the 70s. It’s relatively easy to heat and keep cool. Not long after buying our house, I began to indulge my green thumb. The beans and tomatoes growing against the cedar fence were my handiwork a couple years ago. However, after buying a freezer, I’ve turned my attention toward buying things in bulk and keeping my larder packed with enough food for 90 days at a time. I even designed a 90-day food plan around our top 12 favorite meals so as not to waste my money on food that we’d maybe never eat like preppers sometimes do.
I’m not a prepper.
I’ve merely copied the way my grandparent’s lived. I rarely eat out, never waste food, buy things in bulk, and plan my menus carefully. Consequently, we always have plenty of food in the house and almost never throw anything away.
Although my gardens are largely centered around herbs and flowers now, I know exactly where and how I would expand if I decided that I needed to add homegrown food to my larder. I also have well-honed skills.
Raising food is harder than you think.
Below is a good example of how I manage an additional level of self-reliance. I have two of these rain barrels. It’s so easy to use rainwater to water my gardens. I have a garden hose that I can also use, but I prefer my rainwater. If I wanted, I could add two more rain barrels, one at each corner of the house. It’s amazing how quickly they fill and then overflow, literally within minutes. I have a perfect spot to put in about a dozen raised beds if I decided I needed to grow food. Some days, I’m so tempted, but I resist the urge. It’s just the two of us living in our house and we need to conserve our energy. My food plan seems to be working well for the time being.
I have room in my tiny backyard for more raised beds, too. I currently have two where I once raised beet greens and rainbow swiss chard. Now they’re full of sunflowers, Mexican torch flowers, and zinnias which the birds and bees appreciate.
Above is a corner of my patio where I keep two really worthwhile discoveries, my Noocity and my Garden Tower.
I purchased both five or six years ago. My Garden Tower is amazing. Right now it’s full of petunias, marigolds, and zinnias. Along the bottom I have lots of sweet basil growing. We make our own fresh pesto sauce. I highly recommend growing your own sweet basil for that reason alone.
If you’re an apartment dweller or just prefer a compact garden, the Garden Tower is your friend.
Even in hot weather, I don’t have to water mine but every three days or so. It’s self-composting. I add red wrigglers at the beginning of the season. Down the center is a place to put kitchen scraps, leaves, and other bits and pieces. The worms feast on my offerings and then create worm tea in return. As I water the Garden Tower, the extra water runs into a drawer where the tea ends up. Below is a photo of the open drawer as it’s filling with worm tea. Also, at the end of the season there is compost that I can remove through the drawer and add to either my Garden Tower or elsewhere. It’s amazing.
Then there’s my Noocity.
I bought it from Portugal during a crowd-sourcing event. It’s amazing, too. I’ve grown lettuce and other greens in it as well as radishes. I now only have flowers and swiss chard.
These amazing garden beds were designed for roof-top gardening because they don’t need to be watered very often.
I can leave mine for several weeks without watering. Every plant that I place in it has thrived with minimal care. If I were to decide to raise more food, I think I’d place these amazing beds around the outer edge of my patio before I’d consider adding traditional raised beds in the open spaces left on my tiny lot. I think I could fit at least six Noocity beds on my patio and still have plenty of room left. They’d require little watering and probably do well. We put our Noocity on cement blocks to save me from bending over, but that’s not necessary.
The point of this article is to impress my readers with how little land a person would need to grow an impressive amount of food.
If I had six Noocity grow beds and my Garden Tower on my patio, that alone would produce a lot of fresh food for summer eating. If I added a dozen raised beds to my little side yard plus grew food against my cedar fence, then we’re starting to talk about enough food to can or freeze.
You see, where I’m going with this?
You gotta learn to think like my grandparents. They never gave up their self-reliant ways even when they lived in town. They always had enough food to feed themselves for a year.
Now that’s freedom!
Teresa is a retired educator, author, world traveler, and professional myth buster. You can find her books on Amazon.
