Dreaming of being a Smallholder

All my life I have dreamed of owning a bit of land. with a beautiful old traditional welsh cottage farmhouse.... no neighbours..... total peace and quiet....away from the rat race of life...and living off the land as much as possible.

But with all Dreams, its only a Dream, and in reality this georgous, un-modernised welsh cottage, with its 10 Acres of fields, woodland and its very own babbling stream at the bottom of the cottage garden will only be that.

As in reality, even though House prices have come tumbling down due to the world reccession, smallholdings, Farms or anything with a bit of Land out in the country has held its own, and the prices have stayed fairly stable.( excuse the pun).

This beautifull cottage was on the market for 220k, a steal if you got the money to buy it outright, or for someone who could sell their property in a big city, but for us who live a few miles away, and are on minimum wage...... A place like this will totally out of our reach. ( at the moment)

In recent years whether it is due to the recession and tightening their budgets, or that people just fed up with the supermarkets and producers messing around with our food, have started growing more fruit and vegetables, and even made keeping chickens as backyard pets trendy.

Allotments have up to a 5 year waiting list.

Will my Daydream ever be a Reality? Well i am trying very hard for it to be...

I am reading practically every book on smallholdings, and living off the land, and have noticed there are loads of new books coming out every year to feed the good life trend, but there is only one true self sufficiency book, that was written by the guru himself John Seymour. If i only had one book, then this would be it.

I have a few chickens and ducks, which we have started breeding, and take them to the poultry auctions, along with the surplus veg plants that we grow, but with only having a small-ish garden we can only do so much.

I save whenever i can, and have turned into the biggest tightwad, thrifty person you have ever met. I can thank the tightwad gazzette for that, this book is more of a motorvation book for me, it make me look at our day to day lives, to see where we can save and make more money.( now that will be another hub)

One day....maybe one day, before i am too old to work the land, we might be able to afford a place like this, but in the mean time i will carry on browsing the estate agents like ruralscene and DayDream.

over the coming weeks i will be writting more hubs on our journey so far in trying to make our dream a reality.....How we managed to get out of the grips of debt......started saving.... and use this time to learn and gain experience... ready for the day when our DayDream comes true

Just an update.... i have written 2 new hubpages , on how we decame debt free to get us on track with saving for our dream smallholding.. being a savvy shopper part 1, and how we made money out of recycling....check them out