What is a Farmlet?

I thought I created the word “farmlet” but a Google search shows that Australians and New Zealanders use it to describe small farms.

I originally used farmlet in my post Driving to the Oregon Coast to describe rural residences that obviously aren’t making a living at farming, but sometimes raise a few animals and usually plant a vegetable garden. Outbuildings and fences are common. Some support small orchards. They may be what’s left of an original homestead after it’s been subdivided a bazillion times and most of it sold off in small parcels.

Wikipedia doesn’t have a definition listed for it, so I’d like to take this opportunity to create my own definition. Farmlet describes the lifestyle of the residents as much as it describes the property. Homes with edible landscapes could be considered farmlets. Any small piece of property where the owners grow several different kinds of foods for their own use (without large machinery) I consider a farmlet.

My husband and I both work full time. We spend many of our weekends maintaining our half-acre farmlet in the middle of town. I raise food for our own use in a 24 by 52 foot vegetable garden which includes a small strawberry patch in addition to many vegetables. We have 15 fruit trees in our small orchard: two semi-dwarf peach trees, five cherries, two plums, one prune, two pears, and three apples. Along the borders and in the landscape of the back yard we planted two kiwi vines, two rhubarb plants, four blueberry bushes, an elderberry tree, a currant bush, and a two pawpaw trees. Well we didn’t plant the elderberry tree. I think a bird did it for us.

I’d like to raise a few chickens for eggs and meat, and maybe milk a small cow, but I don’t think my close neighbors would appreciate that much “farming”. We care for only one animal, a 16-year-old cat named Pepper. Pepper is useless except for shedding his hair and spreading his scent all over the place, which seems to be effective at keeping rabbits out of my garden. Yes, even though we live in town, I have encountered rabbits in our yard.

Pepper has only a few teeth left, is hard of hearing, hard of seeing, and hard of smelling. The poor guy has trouble finding the treats that I drop in his bowl, but he still thinks he is a ferocious hunter. Last summer I saw him chase a rabbit at full speed for about 30 feet and then just plop down to rest. Maybe the rabbit ran beyond his fuzzy field of vision and he thought it evaporated or he scared it away. The rabbit took its time hopping over to the neighbor’s yard. I went back to pulling weeds.

Dictionary.com does have a definition for farmlet:

...a small residential farm run by an owner who earns income elsewhere.

Looks like I was on the right track after all, even though I apparently was not the first to invent the word.

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"farmlet." Webster's New Millennium™ Dictionary of English, Preview Edition (v 0.9.7). Lexico Publishing Group, LLC. 04 Jun. 2008. .
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