How to Set up Your Homestead for Under $1000

When you think about setting up a homestead, you probably think you need acres of land, tons of extra time, a big truck, and maybe a few kids willing to help maintain it. It sounds out of reach. But the truth is that idyllic homestead life can be a lot closer than you think.

Setting up a mini homestead can be as easy as ordering prefab materials on Amazon, and taking just one trip to your local garden center or big box store. You definitely do NOT need a truck to set up a mini homestead in this day and age! Everything can be delivered straight to your door, complete with step by step instructions.

A small backyard farm might consist of:

• few vegetable garden beds
• a small orchard with a couple fruit trees and berries
• a small chicken coop with 3-4 chickens
• a composting system

This size mini homestead can be set up in a small backyard and can produce a surprising amount of food, especially during the summer months (if you are in zones that rely on summer weather for growing).

Below are my recommendations if you are just getting started with setting up your mini backyard farm.

Raised Beds on Amazon

If you are just starting a garden or homestead from scratch, I would recommend starting with 2-4 garden beds. This is more than enough to grow plenty of your own food and have leftovers for preserving, freezing and picking (and gifting!). Any. more and you might find you are spending a ton of time keeping up with your harvest. Start small and grow as you need to!

Here are my favorite raised garden beds from Amazon. Getting pre-fab pieces is about the same cost as buying wood and constructing beds your self. I’d much rather have these delivered to my doorstep with all the supplies and instructions for putting them together quickly.

This raised bed is perfect if you have a flat-ish yard space for your garden:

This planter box is perfect for a patio or deck area. It’s also available in 8-foot long version for more space.

If you want to automate your watering, you will need a soaker hose and a hose timer. Here are my favorites:

Of course, you will also need soil for setting up your mini homestead garden beds, which will cost you about $100 and a trip to your local garden center for a few soil ingredients. You can also call around to landscaping companies to get yards of premixed garden soil delivered.

Chicken Coop

This attractive and efficient chicken coop fits 2-4 chickens. If you aren’t planning on expanding your flock this is a perfect starter chicken coop, with great reviews for under $200! You literally can’t beet that. Building this DIY would cost at least $500 and probably your entire summer. It also comes in different sizes (and colors!) – perfect if you plan on having more of fewer chickens in your flock.

Once you get your coop, you will also need to get a water dispenser, food dispenser, and bedding. Some people also like to use nesting pads, but we just put cedar shavings in the nesting boxes.

Amazon is the best place for the water and food dispensers for chicken coops. I have two of each so that I can set up a second one when I go away and my 9 chickens have plenty to eat and drink! But if you only have 2-4 chickens, one feeder and waterer will probably be enough, even for a week away.

For a more cost effective option:

We have 2 chicken waterers: A metal one for winter and a plastic one that we use as a second waterer in the summer, since we are out of town a lot.

The metal one is critical for winter because we have this warming plate that it sits on to keep the chicken water from freezing when it’s below freezing outside.

They both hold 4-5 gallons of water. Chickens drink a LOT of water when it’s hot, so it’s super important to make sure they have plenty of water at all times.

And because we go away so often, we have cameras on our chicken coops. We use two all-weather ring cameras, powered by ring-compatible solar panels. This gives us pease of mind when we are away because we can access the “chicken cam” on our phones from anywhere in the world. If we see that the water is out or the food is tipped over, we can call someone to fix it.

Orchard

Your orchard requires very little of you, aside from managin animals that want to eat your delicious harvest!

You may need a sturdy fence to keep the deer from eating your trees. Opt for one that is at least 4 feet tall if you are keeping deer out.

For smaller animals like dogs, you can do a 3 foot fence, which is usually enough to deter them. this is the kind of fence we use – it’s welded wire fencing with garden stakes. It blends in with the forest behind it so you barely see it, and it’s very effective at deterring deer:

Vermin like Groundhogs can seriously damage your garden and orchard as well, so it can be worth investing in a have-a-heart trap to relocate any pesky big large rodents.

My husband hates having to mow around all the trees in the orchard, becuase he needs to very carefully weed whack around them to keep the grass down. It’s way too time consuming! So he found these tree mats, which act like a mulch skirt, but they are super durable. He can go right over them with the lawn mower and not worry about grass and weeds getting out of control next to the trees, and NO MORE WEED WHACKING!

Composting

No homestead is complete without composting! This is how you complete your mini ecosystem from Growing your Food -> Eating your food -> Food Waste -> Compost -> Growing Your food again!

The type of composter you use depends on how much space you have. Below Ive listed a few options for different spaces:

If you have a lot of space, this is a plug and play version of a compost pile. It keeps everything tidy and wont attract animals. It’s a great option if you don’t want to build one yourself (and this one is very inexpensive!):

This is the compost tumbler I have, and I used it when i had a smaller yard and one garden bed, and it worked great! I got tons of high quality compost for my garden from this apparatus.

If you are in an apartment or condo with no outdoor space and still want to compost, this is an in-kitchen composting option. This didn’t exist back when I lived in a city apartment, so I instead used patio vermiculture on my second-floor patio to compost! But this is what I had been shopping for before I decided to try worm composting:

Are You Ready to Set up your Mini Homestead?

I hope I was able to help you feel more confidence about setting up your mini Homestead! As you can see, everything you need can be bought on Amazon (Except the Soil and Plants!).

At the bare minimum your mini homestead may have two 4′ x 8′ raised garden beds, a small chicken coop, and 4 orchard trees, plus some berry bushes. This is plenty to give a family a lot of homegrown food all summer long, with enough left over for freezing, pickling, and other kitchen experiments!

Here is a rough cost breakdown of how this can be done under $1000, if you stick to the basics:

• 2 4×8 Raised Beds: $220
• Garden Soil: $100
• 1 Chicken Coop: $190
• Chicken Feeder: $30
• Chicken Waterer: $30
• Chicken Bedding: $50
• Compost Bin: $20

That is $640, which leaves you $360 to spend on PLANTS! Which is absolutely the best part of gardening. You may also need to invest in some of the optional things I suggested in my post, possibly install a fence or two, and of course buy chicken food, which is about $20-30 per month.

And there you have it! As you can see, It is completely doable to start a garden with under $1000. Once you set it up you will have it forever and it should continue to give you fresh food each year (and you didn’t need to quit your job, buy more land, or get a truck!).

For more info on how to make your mini homestead lazy-friendly (ie: you can spend more time laying on the beach, and less time keeping your plants alive) check out this post about how to make your garden as low-maintenance as possible.

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