Homesteading on a Rental Property: How We Grow 65% of Our Food
Homesteading on a rental property can be a real challenge. I know because I have been doing it for more than ten years. Where there is a will, there is a way, and that includes homesteading!
As much as I would like to own my own perfect homesteading, prepper property, it just isn’t realistic with our budget right now. I know many of you are in the same situation. The good news is, there is still a lot you can do without owning your own property or having a lot of money!
Homesteading on a Rental Property
- How I Got Here
- The Redneck Apartment
- Gardening on a Rental Property
- Growing Fruit on a Rental
- Raising Animals on a Rental
- Homesteading on a Rental
How I Got Here
I grew up on acreage, and through my teenage years had animals and my own garden. When I was 17 we moved to a different state and rented a house there. It was right around that time I started getting more serious about homesteading and emergency preparedness. Thankfully that rental house was on twelve acres and the landlord was great about letting us use the land. I learned a lot and gained many new homesteading skills during those years.
When my husband and I first were married, we moved into the cheapest rental house in our town. It was a 300 square foot studio with a tiny yard. The first spring I obtained permission to turn the yard into a garden, with the stipulation that I would have to replant the grass when we moved.
We built raised beds from scratch, and filled them with compost I hauled in buckets from the animals I had left at my parents’ property. The city only allowed watering on certain days, and we had to share the water spigot with the other house on the property. Still we managed to grow a nice garden that year. The raised beds, (which I still have), cost about $100 to build, and I spent about $30 on plant starts.
The Redneck Apartment
Our next house was in a redneck apartment complex. There were five families squeezed onto a narrow ridge. They let us fence the hillside for a few animals, and we moved our raised beds to the back yard, hauling the dirt from our previous rental. We kept a freezer and other things that didn’t fit in our house in my parent’s barn.
I really wanted more garden space, so I put out ads on some local Facebook pages. Two people responded by offering me garden spots. That year I drove around tending to three different gardens and grew enough to sell some of the extra at the farmers market. By the next year I’m pretty sure our landlord was sick of all of our homesteading projects in their yard. We were really feeling crowded with two kids in a one bedroom house, and thankfully a better opportunity presented itself.
We found five acres of bare land for rent, all set up with mobile home hookups. After some searching, we found a steal on a mobile home that just needed a little work. We were able to buy it with cash.
We’ve now been renting this property for four years. With all of the landlord’s rules and restrictions on how many and what type of animals we can have, it’s definitely not the easiest way to homestead. But we have made it work, and are now growing a large percentage of our own food.
If you’re stuck on a rental property, I’m going to share some tips below on how you can still homestead and grow your own food.
Gardening on a Rental Property
Gardening is one of the easiest things to do on a rental property. Most landlords who might be opposed to animals are perfectly fine with a garden.
Gardens don’t need much infrastructure like animals, and if your landlord desires, you can easily smooth the area out and plant grass when you are ready to move, leaving no traces a garden was even there.
When we first moved here, we asked permission to fence in a garden area. Our landlord initially gave us permission, but once we put in a fence he decided he didn’t like where it was and made us move the whole thing.
Thankfully that only happened once and we’ve been able to keep the main garden in the same spot ever since!
Our main fenced garden area is ⅛ acre, which allowed us to grow over 2,000lbs of vegetables this year. We only have 80-100 days between frosts in our area, so if you are in a warmer climate you could grow far more food than that in the same area.
We also incorporate some edibles into the landscape, mixed with flowers to keep it pretty!
Although we aren’t doing so right now, in the past we’ve rented property for a market garden. If you want to go that route, I’d highly recommend Curtis Stone’s Book “The Urban Farmer”, which goes into tons of detail on how he grows vegetables for profit on rented land.
While a permanent greenhouse might not work on a rental property, there are lots of more temporary options. This is the 6 ½’ x 10’ greenhouse we are using. We did double check with the landlord before putting it up.
Growing Fruit on a Rental Property
Fruit is a little harder to grow on a rental. Assuming your landlord is okay with it, it still doesn’t make much sense to plant trees that will take years to bear fruit if you are only living somewhere temporarily.
We still grow quite a bit of fruit on our rental, though!
We grow two kinds of fruit (plus melons in the garden!). The first is regular berries, and the second is annual garden berries such as Chichiquelite and Litchi Tomatoes.
For berries, we grow raspberries, strawberries and goji berries, and are experimenting with some other types of berries.
Strawberries are a great option if you are temporarily living somewhere, since they don’t require any kind of trellising and can bear fruit the first year.
Annual garden berries are actually in the tomato family and are grown similarly. They produce fruit in a few months, which historically made them popular on new homesteads. This is a great option for homesteading on a rental property!
Our favorite garden berries are Litchi Tomatoes, which look and taste like a mild cherry, and Chichiquelite berries, which taste something like a blueberry and cherry tomato cross.
One more thing we did when it comes to growing fruit, is to plant fruit trees at my parents’ house. They generously share the harvest with us every year.
Raising Animals on a Rental Property
When it comes to homesteading on a rental, raising animals is one area where we’ve had to get creative!
Our landlord allows 2 large animals, 1 dog and 1 cat. They also gave us permission to keep chickens and bees.
For the large animals, we keep a riding horse and a dairy goat on the property.
We also raise sheep for meat by renting out summer pasture from someone else. We purchase lambs in the spring, take them straight to the rental pasture, and then butcher them when the grass dries up in the fall. You can read more about our system for raising lambs here.
Our main chicken flock is a variety of laying breeds and a few laying ducks. We also raise some meat chickens in a small chicken tractor. We can raise a lot of meat birds in limited space by rotating them. We get 15 meat chicks at a time. They spend their first month inside under a heat lamp, and their second month outside in the chicken tractor. If we keep rotating them through the system, we can get a new batch of chicks as often as every six weeks.
It would definitely be easier to have animals if we owned our own property without animal restrictions, but with a little more work we can do a lot while homesteading on a rental.
All that I mentioned allows us to grow about ⅔ of our meat, all of our eggs, honey, and dairy for about half the year.
Homesteading on a Rental
Here’s a summary of what we grow on our rental property for a year:
- All of our vegetables
- A variety of herbs and flowers
- Cornmeal and popcorn
- 75% of our berries
- 75% of our potatoes
- All of our eggs
- Dairy for half the year
- ⅔ of our meat
- honey
While we’d like to grow 100% of our food, it would be pretty hard with where we are at right now. We’re thankful to be able to grow such a large percentage of what we eat and look forward to homesteading on our own property one day!
I hope this article gave you some ideas for homesteading on a rental, and if you have any good ideas that weren’t mentioned here, be sure to share in the comments!
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