Farming Challenge

Don't ask me why this popped into my mind but now that it has it won't leave.....
The scenario: You are an eccentric millionaire living in West Central Florida in the United States. Being eccentric, you decide that to ensure you maintain your street cred among the other eccentric millionaires you will engage in some historical fun. You buy yourself a nice chunk of property (say 100 acres) and decide that your home will be built in the style of a Roman villa, just with modern accoutrement. However, that's not nearly eccentric enough. You also decide that your yard will not only be aesthetically pleasing but consist only of various crops that would have been grown or harvested in the wild during the time of the Late Republic/Early Empire by a Roman.
So that is the challenge, EB-ers. You have 100 acres to play with, with the dual stipulations that whatever is grown in the yard must have been grown by the Romans during the end of EB's timeframe and it must be aesthetically pleasing in some way. Tree, bush, pulses, grains, etc, they are all viable. If an extremely wealthy Roman could have possibly obtained it, our millionaire is allowed to use it. We are not limited to major crops but spices and such as well. For ease of consideration, I will consider "obtainable by a Roman noble" to be the boundaries of EB's map, so China and most of India are out unless you can show that Roman nobles did in fact obtain and occasionally grow crops that originated in such far off lands. If, to make the yard more aesthetically pleasing, introducing some farm animals that would crop plants by eating them would be necessary, that is allowed to, plus it makes the millionaire even more self-sufficient (a good side effect of his eccentricity).
Like I said, a weird idea, but its been niggling my mind for a while.

Slave breeding pens. Silphium might be good too.

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Originally Posted by LordCurlyton

Don't ask me why this popped into my mind but now that it has it won't leave.....
The scenario: You are an eccentric millionaire living in West Central Florida in the United States. Being eccentric, you decide that to ensure you maintain your street cred among the other eccentric millionaires you will engage in some historical fun. You buy yourself a nice chunk of property (say 100 acres) and decide that your home will be built in the style of a Roman villa, just with modern accoutrement. However, that's not nearly eccentric enough. You also decide that your yard will not only be aesthetically pleasing but consist only of various crops that would have been grown or harvested in the wild during the time of the Late Republic/Early Empire by a Roman.
So that is the challenge, EB-ers. You have 100 acres to play with, with the dual stipulations that whatever is grown in the yard must have been grown by the Romans during the end of EB's timeframe and it must be aesthetically pleasing in some way. Tree, bush, pulses, grains, etc, they are all viable. If an extremely wealthy Roman could have possibly obtained it, our millionaire is allowed to use it. We are not limited to major crops but spices and such as well. For ease of consideration, I will consider "obtainable by a Roman noble" to be the boundaries of EB's map, so China and most of India are out unless you can show that Roman nobles did in fact obtain and occasionally grow crops that originated in such far off lands. If, to make the yard more aesthetically pleasing, introducing some farm animals that would crop plants by eating them would be necessary, that is allowed to, plus it makes the millionaire even more self-sufficient (a good side effect of his eccentricity).
Like I said, a weird idea, but its been niggling my mind for a while.

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If its in Arabia, I'd grow frankensence, murr, and dates-dates up the rear. perhaps some tribe might make a god of dates, or a god from dates?:clown: that said, frankensence tops it-especially in the area of yemen and Oman.

If in Kyrene, I'd grow Silphium and wheat..

in Italy, wheat and olives

in he holy land, figs, wheat, and olives

in mesopotamia, barley, dates and figs

It depends in the end on where I am, what the local and/or international demand is, and how good is the local labor.

sorry, I think practically (money)..

We're in modern times, the guy is eccentric, no slaves (sort of illegal here in USA), but he wants only stuff grown from that time period. Money = not an object. It just has to be able to survive in West-Central Florida, so wet, cool winters with few frost days and hot, drier but not parchingly dry summers. Land is fairly fertile and I believe our weather codnitions, while not strictly "Mediterranean", are close enough that most anything that can make it in a Roman villa in Italy could have made it here.

Wheat and olives are certainly quite on to of the list.

Lol you cant literally have slaves, but you can pay people to act like them (Prostitutes, maids, butlers).

Then I'd goto N. Africa and grow Silphium. Valuable stuff that was.

Yeah, when Kyrene monopolized it it was. Lost its value (sort of) when it became more widespread.

Anyway, olives and wheat is a must. So basically you have your own bread and olives/olive oil. You could also have some grapes, red ones that is, so you also add wine to that list. As well as the grapes themselves, of course. Lettuce and cabbage can also be added, as well as carrots, onions and garlic. Especially garlic. Add some fig trees, some apple trees and some berry bushes and you're a king. Oh yeah and flowers too. Ancients loved flowers, they even grew them themselves.

So now you have more or less anything you want. If you buy some cows, sheep, chickens, pigs, goats and a couple of dogs then you are complete. Just have the 'slaves' do the work and you reap the benefits of being self-sufficient.

Maion

Well, its more vauable now since its extinct. :-p I wish we could Jurassic Park that thing.

Lol, yeah anything's possible nowdays. I mean, with advanced genetic engineering:yes:

Maion

y dunt we twist the topic a bit, to something more civilized? like handling a makedonian kleoros (sp), a well off pezhetairos?

romans are too barbaric D:

Also, we haven't described how these will all be aesthetically arranged. My eccentric's other goal is to have all these consumables look pretty on his 100 acre villa. And by the time of Augustus, i.e. the end of EB's timeframe, the Romani would have been the ones people in the area were trying to emulate. Not bad for a bunch of barbaric Italics, eh? We've got a nice list going, now we just need to arrange it so that it looks pretty. I do know that most berries are out since they weren't domesticated before medieval times but if Romans regularly harvested wild berries they can be included in the list.

grapes, wheat, olives, and maybe a couple spices.