Husband Wants To Move To The Country

[Anonymous]

My husband has this wild idea about us moving to the country and living off the land. We have always been city people and planned to move to the suburbs when our kids are older, but he has been talking about it the last couple of weeks. He wants to move to an area - even out-of-state where we can get 2-3 acres of land. He wants to grow our own food and maybe have some chickens. He is a great cook and has really been getting into cooking things from scratch, growing your own food, and living off the land. I thought it was just a wild idea but it’s becoming an almost daily conversation. I’m not even sure how I feel about it.

[Anonymous]

Green Acres! I always wanted to do that, too. *sigh* Perhaps some day.

[Anonymous]

I wish there were a good way for people to live like this for, say, two months without giving up their regular lives. It would probably help city folks with country fantasies figure out how they really feel. And I’m speaking as a city girl with major rural fantasies!

[Anonymous]

A lot of us had ancestors who farmed for a living. It is not an easy life, and requires a host of practical skills that most people today lack (which is why we live here).

[Anonymous]

He who farms for himself has a fool for a farmer.

[Anonymous]

On what money? Is he independently wealthy?

[Anonymous]

I'd divorce him. I'm not even kidding. I barely tolerate the suburbs when I go there and am so relieved to get back to a major city. I am crawling out of my skin in rural areas. This would be a total deal-breaker for me.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:On what money? Is he independently wealthy?

You can still work when you live in a rural area.

[Anonymous]

Does he want to eat a lot of peaches?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Does he want to eat a lot of peaches?

What?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Does he want to eat a lot of peaches?

Peaches for me.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My husband has this wild idea about us moving to the country and living off the land. We have always been city people and planned to move to the suburbs when our kids are older, but he has been talking about it the last couple of weeks. He wants to move to an area - even out-of-state where we can get 2-3 acres of land. He wants to grow our own food and maybe have some chickens. He is a great cook and has really been getting into cooking things from scratch, growing your own food, and living off the land. I thought it was just a wild idea but it’s becoming an almost daily conversation. I’m not even sure how I feel about it.

He's an idiot. I could understand it if he grew up on a farm, but he clearly has no idea what he's talking about. To start with, you are not going to be able to have a viable farm on 2-3 acres- even a real hobby farm is going to be 10 times that big. Farming is miserable back breaking work and he wants to do it on a subsistence scale likely ruling out anything tool designed to make it less miserable. Do you plan on working to buy food when he inevitable produces far less than you need (not to mention money for utilities, clothing, transportation...)? The further out you go the less access you will have to good jobs and jobs in general if you go rural enough. You also are likely to have trouble getting an internet connection good enough to work remotely on if you are too rural (Hughes is miserable and unworkable and standard in rural America).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I wish there were a good way for people to live like this for, say, two months without giving up their regular lives. It would probably help city folks with country fantasies figure out how they really feel. And I’m speaking as a city girl with major rural fantasies!

If you have the money buy a weekend house with a couple of hundred acres and put a goat on it for the tax break.

[Anonymous]

OP here. He doesn’t want to become a farmer and own animals or anything. He is talking about growing some of our food like produce and possibly getting chickens ( for eggs). He is fine with not getting chickens, but with the cost of living and inflation, he thinks it would be cool to be able to grow our own food. It wouldn’t be enough to fully live off, but we would be able to save money and grow our own food that we know is healthy.

He is not talking about living in a super rural area either. Most of the suburbs we looked at don’t offer more than .25 acres of land. He thinks moving to a place a little more rural but by the city or suburbs would be cool.

We are not wealthy but we make good money and he won’t quit his job. He works from hone and can work from anywhere most of the time.

[Anonymous]

We live on .47 acres and have chickens and a big garden that provides a surprising amount of food for us. The garden can be a real PITA though - birds eat the berries, caterpillars feast on the squash, cukes, collards, rapini, etc. And foxes have eaten our chickens.

My point is that you can do a lot to grow food on a small plot, and it could be an interim step to figure out how much you can tolerate all the work that goes along with trying to separate from the grid. But if your DH is looking for space away from neighbors that's a different thing.