Wikiup Creek Farm: My dreams for a sustainable future

So I've been at my sister and brother-in-laws place the past few days; on the farm I grew up on, in Prattsburgh New York, the farm that will one day be my sustainable (or as sustainable as possible,) community. It has been very cold and snowy here...I'm really enjoying "real winter," as opposed to the rainy, Pacific Northwest winters. This morning I went for a long, meandering walk out in the Douglas firs (at one time, this place was a Christmas tree farm.) I visited the creek that was basically my home growing up; from May through October, my sisters and I would spend all of our free time in that creek, picking wild rasberries and blackberries, searching for salamanders, catching minnows, building dams, and playing a game we called "no rules soccer," which was basically kicking a soccer ball around in the water, and trying our damnedest to catch each other and dunk each other under water. Wonderful memories.

Down by a bend in that creek, there is a giant willow tree under which we began to build a clubhouse once upon a time, but which never got finished. The clubhouse is long gone, now the only thing under that giant willow is an old Jeep Cherokee which died years ago. As I gazed at that creek and the willow, I began to picture people down in the creek, spreading acorns out in the water to let the tannins run away with the current. I saw a wikiup under the willow, someone pissing on the bank of the creek, a momma inside the wikiup nursing a baby, snowshoes made out of old pvc pipe piled up around the wikiup. Basically, the adult version of the clubhouse came to mind; but people would actually be living there.

As I walked around the rest of the property, I began to ask myself important questions, such as 1) how many people would this place support? There are about five acres out of fourteen which are actually cleared (plus a giant, one-acre yard which obviously needs to be turned into a food-forest,) and since I'm not planning on clearing any more then those five acres, what would I grow to be the most efficent and self-sufficent as possible? How many people could you (mostly) feed on five (six) acres?
2) What foods would we have to still buy, or go elsewhere to get? I think I'd have goats for milk and cheese, chickens for eggs, plus all of your standard veggies and some fruit bushes and trees, but other then that, I think I'd have to take trips to harvest acorns (for flour,) venison, fish, etc. We would have to purchase things like cooking oil, other grains, coffee, etc. There is a pond across the road I'd be interested in leasing or purchasing as well, to stock with fish and maybe even wild rice, which used to be abundant in Upstate New York, before the land was all tiled and drained to make room for commercial farming. The Seneca people used to harvest wild rice; they also had crabapple orchards, maple sugar groves and of course, lots and lots of fish (rainbow trout, picceral and the like.) Maple sugaring would provide all the sweetening we'd need on our farm; there are also lots of edible wild plants I was checking out today: lots of wild carrots and fern fiddleheads, mushrooms, fruit (blackberries, rasberries, apples, ect.) I'd probably also want to keep bees, honey is very delicious and nutritious and the wax can be used for a variety of things, from candles to soap.

So there are lots of things to learn/consider. In my research today, I learned about a couple of books which would probably give me a better idea about how to be self-sufficient on five acres; one is called Five Acres and Independence and the other is called The Self-Sufficient Life.

Love ya,
Carrot