PLANNING
Make a map ~ maplotter style
A
smallholder who
wishes to plan his
summer plantings
accurately will find his work
made much easier if he has
an accurate, to-scale, plan of
his property to work on.
While many will have
acquired accurate municipal
property plans when they
bought their land, others
might need to start from
scratch, particularly if the
municipal plans are inaccurate as far as the position of
buildings on the property are
concerned.
Fortunately, modern technology makes this easy and
cheap to do. The simplest
way, if you have access to a
computer, printer and the
internet, is to locate your plot
using Google Earth or Google
Maps and email yourself a
picture of your property,
adjusting the altitude of the
shot so that the entire
property fits on to an A4 sheet
of paper when printed (or
larger, if you have a bigger
printer).
Using your printed picture,
trace the boundaries of the
property on a blank sheet or,
better still, on to a sheet of
graph paper, marking any
internal salient features such
as buildings, dams, fences,
roads etc.
If you now scan this drawing
into your computer you will
have a template which you
can print multiple copies of so
that you can draw all sorts of
variations of your plans as you
progress.
Adding actual lengths to each
section can be done by
measuring one straight length
and working out the ratio of
this length to its equivalent on
your map, and then using this
to multiply out the lengths of
the other boundary or fence
sections.
This, of course, is absolutely
free. Y