Walk the land before you buy anything with a pulse

Nearly every smallholding that struggles does so for the same reason: the animals arrived before the plan did. It is far easier to fall in love with a flock of Shetlands or a pair of weaners than to spend a wet Saturday in February squelching about with a spade, but the second activity is what keeps the first one enjoyable for the next twenty years. Before you order stock, plant a hedge or dig a bed, spend a full winter getting to know what your land will and will not do.

Walk it in the wettest week of the year. Walk it again after a hard frost. Stand at the top of the slope with a mug of tea and watch where the water goes. That single exercise will tell you more than any set of particulars ever will.

Read your soil properly

Soil is the foundation of everything, and it is not really a case of good or bad — it is a case of what you have, and what you do with it.

• Texture. Take a handful of damp soil and roll it between your palms. If it forms a long ribbon, you have clay. If it crumbles and feels gritty, sand. If it holds together but stains your hands, loam. Each dictates a different approach to drainage, cultivation and stocking.
• Depth. Push a spade in and dig a spit. If you hit rock or pale subsoil at 20cm, you have shallow ground — fine for grazing, hopeless for deep-rooted crops such as parsnips or fruit trees.
• pH. A basic test kit costs very little and gives a reading good enough for most decisions. Most vegetables and grasses want pH 6.0 to 7.0. Acid ground suits blueberries and rhododendrons; lime-loving crops will sulk.
• Drainage and compaction. Look for rushes, sedges and standing water in winter — all signs of poor drainage. A compacted layer a spade's depth down will keep roots shallow and grass thin.

Also note what is already growing. Nettles suggest fertile, disturbed ground. Docks and creeping thistle suggest heavy, poached land. Ragwort is poisonous to livestock and, on grazing land, needs dealing with properly and persistently. Knowing all this in advance is far cheaper than discovering it with a vet's bill.

Aspect, shelter and microclimate

In the UK, a south-facing slope gains roughly two to three weeks of growing season at each end compared with a north-facing one. That matters for early salad, tree fruit and the drying of fleeces. A slope also sheds frost, which pools in hollows and behind solid boundaries. Those hollows are your frost pockets, and they are the worst possible place for a polytunnel or an early potato bed.

Prevailing south-westerly winds strip warmth, flatten tall crops and make livestock miserable. A permeable boundary — a mixed hedge, a woven fence with windbreak fabric — is far better than a solid wall, which simply creates turbulence on the sheltered side. If you have no shelter, plant it now. A hedge takes five years to earn its keep, and those are five years you cannot buy back later.

Access is the job you only do once

Bad access will annoy you every single day, so sort it while the ground is empty and the budget still has some give in it.

• Gateways at least 3.6m wide, hung so they swing clear of the track and cannot be lifted off their hinges.
• A hardstanding for deliveries, hay, straw and the trailer — somewhere that stays firm in January.
• A turning area. Reversing a loaded trailer down a narrow track in the rain is an excellent way to fall out with your neighbours.
• Check for public rights of way. A footpath through your proposed pig paddock raises questions about gates, dogs and biosecurity that are far easier to plan around than to argue about afterwards.
• Remember that new tracks, hardstandings and buildings usually need planning permission. Ask the local planning authority before you dig.

Water: the quiet essential

Water is the resource smallholders most often underestimate. A lactating ewe drinks up to 8 litres a day; a horse, 25 to 45 litres; a beef animal, 30 to 50. Add washing, irrigation and a hot summer, and a single standpipe becomes a bottleneck remarkably quickly.

Mains water is convenient but metered. Rainwater harvesting into linked IBC tanks off a barn roof will carry you a long way for irrigation and cleaning, though it needs filtering before it goes into drinking troughs. If you plan to abstract from a stream or a borehole, check the rules first — small abstractions are often exempt, but the thresholds matter and the paperwork is duller than the fine. Whatever the source, put troughs where you can reach them with a vehicle, drain or insulate exposed pipework before the first hard frost, and give every paddock its own supply so you are never moving animals to water rather than to grass.

Stocking the land you actually have

Overgrazing is the classic smallholding mistake, and it happens slowly. On reasonable lowland pasture, plan for roughly four to six ewes per acre across the year, and fewer if you intend to cut hay from part of it. Hens on a fixed run will destroy it within a season; a mobile house moved weekly will not. Two weaners will happily plough a paddock of a tenth of an acre down to mud in a few months — which is fine if that is the plan, and a disaster if it is not.

Divide what you have into at least three or four paddocks with electric fencing, and rest each one in turn. Grass that is rested comes back stronger; grass grazed to the bone grows weeds, poaches in winter and takes years to recover. Keep a bare field or two in reserve for the wet months, and be honest about how many animals you can carry through to spring. Buying less stock than you think you want is almost always the better decision.