"most landscape architects work only with smaller residential lots "

Actually, only about 32% of landscape architects work on residential sites (bureau of labor statistics). The "Firm Finder" link might be the most helpful, but the others might be informative as many people don't know much about the profession of landscape architecture and that it is not just a fluffier name for all landscape designers.

http://www.klarb.ky.gov/default.htm
http://www.kyasla.com/index.html

Here is a link that might be useful: Firm Finder

We have more than 1/4 section of land in forest and pasture so I understand what you are facing.

I had posted here for some direction (altho probably expected the impossible in actual concrete ideas) of how to go about landscaping our newly enlarged house yard. I don't think most people can visualize beyond the usual city lot.

I think the ideal would be to find a landscape architect who will come and look at your property and draw up a basic plan you can follow over time to ultimately see your vision become reality. However, if that isn't possible you are on your own to do the best you can.

We owned this land for 5 years before we did anything other than cut firewood to use in our other house. During that time we walked it and made tentative plans for where to locate the house and outbuildings and how the driveway would work best. Since we had livestock we planned a keyhole driveway and maximum grazing so made our fenced house yard fairly small, about the size of a large city lot. That worked well for many years.

More recently, since we no longer have livestock except for OP's grazing to keep the grass down, we decided to enlarge our house yard to serve us better and include a garden house and labyrinth. Thus, I posted here to get some ideas.

What anyone without a massive budget needs to understand is that developing a large acreage takes time and patience and quite a bit of money. If you cannot find help IRL I suggest prioritizing. In your case that might be deciding where the trees will be located as trees take time to grow and there is no way to hurry this. Siting your house and access to it are at the top of the priority list. There are always many choices and only you can decide which suits you best. Our original house site which we spent much time clearing was not the one we ultimately used. Your pond will require specific info - is there a creek, or how will you fill this? You may need permission from regional government for a pond. You need to study the topography of the property and even on a large acreage take neighbors and traffic on public roads into consideration.

Do you have access to public water and sewage or will you need a well and septic? Power lines are also a very important consideration. We brought the power/phone lines in a distance from the house to a small power house then underground to our house from there.

Be prepared to hire men and machines which can cost a lot. We've had several in here at different times to clear for power lines, well and water lines, septic, and just to remove large stumps. I originally saved many large trees in my house yard but found I only had shade and really wanted a garden which required sun. So even tho DH cut down the trees we needed a huge backhoe to remove the stumps. Make sure you know the exact charges as there's more than a per hour charge, there also is a charge for hauling those big machines which can add up in costs.

A large property is a real challenge to design correctly and I wish you much luck in getting it the way you want. Overall, I'm happy with what we've done altho there are things that in hindsight I would change. However at the time we made these decisions it seemed the best way. Try not to expect perfection when dealing with nature, or people, and enjoy the process.

Feels like dà vu...

Any progress since last time?

Here is a link that might be useful: Farm

Honestly, does everyone expect someone to take 20-hours and draft up a plan to send you over the internet? If they did would you use it -- I wouldn't.

You have lots of space to work with, but the real question is whether or not you want the maintenance of all of that space?

LA work with entire neighborhoods and developments, so a large scale space utilization is not daunting to the right training. As you noted the local LD may be limited to a basket of tricks for a small lot, but try a land development firm or look into books on park design.

A farm and grazing is a productive use of space. A wildlife refuge is a productive use of space. What things do you value enough to maintain them

A few thoughts to consider:

1. Suggest you exhaust all the free services available to you in Kentucky. The Un. of Kentucky has a very active program and your local Extension Office is a terrific resource and works everyday with farmers and owners of large properties. Lots of experience and land planning services available through that office. And, they can put in in touch with your local Forestry Agent who can advise you on tree/timber growth. I have often called in both services when planning large tracts of land for their vast local experience. Also, your Agent will know what is available in the way of conservation type easements and how to take advange of their tax reductions.

2. Suggest you sit down with pencil and paper and give yourself the "test" that a landscape architect would require at the initial consultation. Think about the following questions:

a) Do you wish to be self-sufficient on this property growing the majority of food, etc? That requires one type of plan.

b) Large properties require machines which always need maintenance. Are you mechanical and willing to do the endless tinkering necessary to keep everything up and running? If not then this radically affects you land planning.

c) Do you plan on building energy efficient buildings? Perhaps geothermal heating? These are whole new areas to study. Are you interested in doing so?

c) A solid plan begins with the landowner understanding himself, his interests and his abilities. Study yourself first for important answers and your planning will be 50% finished.

"c) A solid plan begins with the landowner understanding himself, his interests and his abilities. Study yourself first for important answers and your planning will be 50% finished."

... and, as Nandina is demonstrating, a good landscape designer knows how to get that information out of you whether or not you are completely conciously understanding yourself and you may not even notice that (s)he is getting that info out of you.

Drawing the plans is the easy stuff (that other stuff is what makes it 50% finished). Don't underestimate the human interaction with your designer whether (s)he is an LA, an educated designer, self taught, or a very well experienced design/build contractor. ... or you'll miss that first 50%.

Peculiar.

agupton, guess you'll have to excuse my wondering what exactly it is that you think posting here might accomplish. That's just a way of trying to tease out a bit more info. You never ansered the lease question the last time, and I, for one, still can't tell if you are leasing 51 / 58 acres with an option to buy 10 or will your final purchase be the whole acreage?

Can't figure out your comment about landscape architects. Seems I toured several estates when I lived in the bluegrass and the work of both local and national landscape architects were featured prominently .

Maybe you are simply looking for a less expensive way to "confirm" the plans you have developed? That's only going to work locally, I think. If you can't find a designer, then I'd simply talk it over with as many different people as possible. Nandina has already pointed you in the right direction. Fill in the picture with local "experts". Figure out if you've got an "Ol' Mr. Davison". A parishioner of mine a few years ago, he did grading work all over a particular county. He was famous for "having an eye" for where a driveway or pond should be situated.

If you can't hire design expertise, you may have to rely more on the native wisdom that might come from neighbors or contracters who do particular kinds of work. None of them, however, will really sit down and walk through the whole planning process with you.

Wellspring

Interview yourself and figure out what you want out of the 50 acres before you start trying to find a designer. If you want to build on 10 acres and pull in the remaining 40 at the end of the lease, that's different from just taking the 10 and selling off the rest.

Do you want isolation in the middle of the 50, or close to a road with a 50-acre back yard?

Central Park in New York was designed by landscape architects. Landscape architects design landscapes, the market for design work in small lots is more likely to be served by garden designers. Anyone who can interface successfully with the public, operate a business can call themselves a garden designer. Landscape architects are registered, board-certified professionals whose fees may often be too high for many people with small projects. Many do work on smaller jobs, when they are retained by people who are not dissuaded by their rates. As with other services, it depends on what the customer thinks they need and what they think it is worth to them.

My understanding on the lease is he has purchased the land but it is still being leased by a local farmer and used as crop land. DS had a similar setup when he purchased his 30 acres. The lease arrangement transfers when the property is sold if the buyer wants to continue it.

To remove a portion of the land out of lease, so he could build a barn, DS had to pay the farmer leasing the land a specified amount of $$/acre.

Hello Agupton,

I am interested in helping you with your project. I have designed three farms of similar size. I live in San Diego and could likely do most of the work remotely. That is provided you can get a good topography map. If you don't know where to get that I may be able to look it up in a Kentucky GIS database. Or better yet you could pay a local Regional Planner,GIS tech, or Engineering firm a small sum to obtain it for you.(Soils data would be very helpful as well) I am not as familiar with local Kentucky ecology as would be ideal, but I could set up a good design with a little consulting about specific species and there is always room for changing plants out if necessary. We could consult with a local nursery to fit the scale of the plants in the plans to what they recommend as well.

You may want to consider a transitional system where you turn some of the row crops into orchard, while continuing to grow on alternate rows for awhile. Myself I'm a fanatical fruit tree collector and I would get as many varieties of the best tasting fruits in the area that produce at alternate times of the year. But this is about your ideas, so I need to get a better idea about that.

There is quite a process to it and I could help walk you through it. Initially we would want to start with your vision, which would translate into a user analysis. This is where we would list everything you want to do with the property and all elements you imagine. For every use you can think of there will be elements you will need, for example if you want to have places to gather it would likely require seating, shade, maybe access to water. Through this process you/we would develop the product of your user analysis, which is a list of elements that you are going to want to implement. These include different types of crops, possibly interpretative areas, sheds, parking, etc. All of these elements would then be cross referenced by one another in a program to program matrix to determine which elements should be located next to what other elements. It is a very efficient way to take what would normally be incomprehensible and develop a visual method of evaluating the myriad of information. It's hard to explain, I'll send you an example to look at. This will help to make sure things are being designed as efficiently as possible. The matrix would help you determine that you need to have parking next to the residence but not next to your quiet space or to have the chicken coups next to the fruit trees to forage under them and keep weeds down. All this information is interpreted into a bubble diagram of the farm to create a loose concept of how the design is to function and where elements are located on the site. From there the detail design begins...

I'd be happy to help for a reasonable fee. Feel free to contact me with any questions. Good luck!

Best,

Jason Bennink ~ gardengrover@gmail.com
Bachelor of Landscape Architecture University of Florida
Minors in Soil and Water Science, Organic/Sustainable Crop Production, and Horticulture Science
15 years of Organic Farming Experience
10 years of Landscape Design and Installations

As someone who posts here fairly often with suggested solutions to problems, I find myself a little ticked about Lucky Gal's assertion that most people can't visualize beyond the standard city lot.

The thing that really matters is not the responders' ability to visualize, but the needs of the person posting and their capacity to convey them to the forum.

Many people posting here with a standard city lot have also received a dearth of responses if they don't tell us enough about their needs and/or if they ask too much of people who are giving advice recreationally.

As the size of a piece of property increases, the number of different things that can be done with it expand exponentially. The vast majority of potential uses are not for aesthetic purposes, as Nandina's post above amply illustrates, and sometimes they are not even particularly functional. If there is no problem to solve, which is often the case when there is simply space to fill, the solution is so subjective as to be intensely personal.

So when strangers interested in landscaping "fail" to make suggestions for a piece of land that has nearly infinite possibilities, it might just be that you haven't established an objective that you are asking for help to achieve, but are rather asking them to help establish an objective. Beyond fairly generic suggestions, that is an impossible assignment to do for a stranger far away unless someone takes the time to interview you extensively.

It could also be that your property and your needs with respect to it just don't interest other people. It is the prerogative of voluntary participants not to respond.

It isn't that they can't visualize.

FWIW

And other than that, I think Lucky Gal provided some great advice and great questions... and maybe realized in the process how hard it is to help from a distance where there are infinite possibilities and an information vacuum :-)

KarinL

So let me get this straight. The majority of you get on here to tell others how poor their ideas are. I would think gardeners would have less time on their hands than to berate people. Spend more time cultivating yourselves and less time focusing on changing others. Much more productive and makes the overall world a happier place. With that, I will now ignore all future correspondence to this link, actually, I'll just find a source that actually responds with helpful criticism. What a waste of time, mine that is.

In all fairness most of the postings actually were questions about the property which if addressed probable would have yielded helpful insights.

I'd like to point out that landscapre architecture is a diverse field. Many people take an aspect of it that they have heard about and project it on the whole profession. The fact is that some do "this" and some do "that". If you look hard enough you will find some that do whatever it is that you are looking for. Some of those can do "it" well while others who do "it" might not do "it" so well.

The only thing that is consistent is that all LAs are involved in land planning to one degree or another.

It is like the medical profession - not all doctors are neurosurgeons, but they all are involved in health care.

It would seem silly if someone posted that they called a cosmetic surgeon to get a heart by-pass and then declared that doctors don't do by-pass surgery. A big difference, of course, is that it is general knowledge that doctors specialize and declare their specialty. That is much less clear in landscape architecture.