Step 2: Planning Individual Areas

To avoid making tasks you hate, the daily maintenance must be easy. The priority of farming must (allways) have higher priority than joyful places.

Take a map from Google earth for instance, and draw the outlines of your property. Draw existing buildings and places to get water. 

There's ofcourse app's for the task, here I've tried out Home Outside.

There's pluses and minuses with each tool you choose.

I prefer colored pencils, paper and liners, but it's more difficult to move on a paper drawing than an computer program. You loose it, you wrinkle it, and you can't really work on it outside the house.
On the other hand a program always has limits, and for a hobby farm, this one most certainly does.
You can draw the big lines, but details is not really a decent option.

If you have a long area of land, like us, with the buildings and water in one end, you don't place your kitchen garden in the opposite end of the area without water. This could on the other hand be great for a forest or nature area for bees. Those would not require constant care and watering.

Start with just the overview of existing buildings and water as the "steady" places. Then all if you together make a "loose" plan. You don't need exact plan with measurements, just an approximately area.
Then you'll go into details later.

For animals check: feeding and watering twi times a day, three if it's very hot. How far are the animal places from a water source?

Check: Gardening tools and distance to kitchen garden. Is the kitchen garden close to the kitchen, so it's easy to get what you need?

Placement of washer and dryer. Where's  the place of the clothes line? It should be easy to get there, to avoid the temptation to throw the clothes in the dryer.

When you think you have everything placed as you like, you twist it.
Why should it NOT be like this?
You'll be surprised if what we have changed by answering that question!

At the left you see screenshots of a sample I made earlier.

You lay down your photo from Google Earth, and then you draw all excisting buildings on top of it.

Finally you can moce the photo from Google Earth, and you have a "clean" overview of the property.  

Now its time to plot in different solutions (always remember; where is the sun!)

You can print your drawing and sketch different solutions - or mess around with it, in the program.

I will definitely not recommend this program as a detailed draw tool, its simply not detailed enough. 

It can only get you to the next step, then the lack of features is frustrating. And at the next step you're going for pen and paper or alike anyway. This is not a task for each year, so do this right, and you'll be grateful you took the time.

But: all in all, if you test another free program, that is better, I would absolutely LOVE to hear about it. Please use the contact form, and send me the name of the program. Thank you :-).