Farming part-time for homestead
Updated Aug 28, 2025
Seeking
- 0-5 Total acres
- 0-5 Acres of cropland or tillable land
Desired locations
I love to garden and am always learning.
Plan
My goal is to work at a community garden and know enough to teach others. My farming status is a volunteer. Right now I am growing a few rows of vegetables. I am experimenting using container pots to grow tomatoes and I am also experimenting growing pumpkins in pots. I hope to take my idea to give away pots to children so that they can grow food in their front yards.
Another goal of mine is to start a no-till community garden that can grow into a small farm, where volunteers work side by side paid employees.
Desired infrastructure
Equipment and infrastructure details
I am used to volunteering on farms, and use whatever tools they provide. I have used a small roto-tiller to build double dug beds by splashing dirt out from side to side and then putting the soil back into the middle.
Other tools that are useful, are broad forks, wheel barrow, garden hoe, rake, hand trowel.
Seeds starting mix: coconut coir, and compost
10 20 treys with 72 cells
Heated greenhouse
Preferred type of opportunity
Opportunity details
I’m really looking to learn as much as I can. I want to help run a community garden one day.
I want to start a farm that can bring people from all walks of life together. I feel like unity heals, and want to reach out to all different races, religions, and people with and without mental illness. I want to combine therapeutic horticulture with practices like meditation, music therapy and art therapy.
I am looking for a small farm to start somehting manageable which we can expand on later. Ideally there would be housing on or near to the farm.
Desired farming practices
Practices details
I really support organic as much as I can. I’m interested in creating no till gardening. Using double dug beds I hope to create a garden that lasts and retains its nutrients year after year with out relying to much on inputs like fertilizer.
The idea is to bring volunteers to the garden by creating a therapeutic garden where people actually can feel the benefits of a living environment.
I want to grow a variety of vegetables and also create value added products…like salad kits that contains farm fresh lettuce tomatoes and cucumbers. These are prepackaged and are easy to market to a variety of retail establishments, like grocery, food trucks, and also fast food.
Production goals
Goals details
I hope to grow lettuce tomatoes and cucumbers year round. These are going to the be the basic ingredients for our salad kits. We will need a greenhouse and row covers to continue the operation into the winter. We also need a green house to start seeds ourselves.
We want to find people and like minorities who need work and will create this work using ‘value added products’. Our goal is to begin to compete with big businesses by starting a grass roots organization.
Our idea is to ‘flip’ big businesses like grocery and fast food and getting them to buy ‘salad kits’ from us. There are minorities like out-of-school youth who need work. We need to start standing up for this generation now.
Farm experience
Years of experience
10 total years of experience
0 years employed as a worker (non-manager)
0 years as a manager
Education, training, and employment experience
Experience details
Most of my farm work has been as a volunteer. I volunteered at different community gardens a lot:
Carolina Community Garden, Triangle Land Conservancy, WOOF Beginner Course in Therapeutic horticulture, Spences Farm For Kits, Grew Micro-greens…traded for pizza, Donated Seedlings to the Christian Help Center, Planted Gardens at My House for Three Consecutive Year. Also I have worked as a landscaper and lawn care for a number of years.