So at this point there are a couple of interesting things:
In the new TP 5 village, I have for the first time on this map built an apiary, a flour mill, and a bakery making pecan pies. This was just within the past couple of years. TP 5 village is on the far northern end of Beanblossom, but I have seen small quantities of flour, honey, and pies showing up in barns (and of course subsequently in houses) all over the map, even on the extreme southeastern and southwestern frontiers. This is something I certainly would not have expected to find.
Also, I've been thinking about the number of houses vs. the number of families as shown in the town hall overview panel. The perennial question is, do you build houses to keep pace with the number of families, or not? And if you build more houses than families, such that some of the families split up, are there negative consequences?
Now mostly the consensus has been that splitting up families has no discernible impact on pop expansion, and I think that this is correct, but there is another effect that has not been noted in this context. That effect is the formation of new families that include a student as one of the primaries. This is not bad in itself, however it can lead to delaying graduation by the new student-homemaker. This is because the student still attends the school that (s)he originally was assigned to at age 10. However, the new home (s)he moves into can be anywhere on the map, and in the case of a spread out town such as Beanblossom (or really just about any town that has a pop of more than just a couple hundred), this can mean that the student now has a very long walk to school. This will delay graduation, possibly adding several more years to the time the student spends in school, depending on the student-homemaker's age and how far (s)he now must walk to school.
Note that this can happen even if there are fewer houses than families, but the nearer the two numbers, the more likely it is to happen. If there are more houses than families, it is essentially 100% likely to happen. Whether this is a bad thing depends on your laborer situation. If you already have lots of laborers, it probably doesn't matter. But if you are stretched thin, and/or if you are trying to expand your pop as quickly as possible, it will slow you down both ways.
This can be counteracted by the schoolhouse shuffle that we hit on in the Flowerchild Commune challenge. That is, build enough "spare" schools to take all your students, assign teachers to these schools, shut down all the other schools, let the game run long enough that all the students get reassigned to theses schools. Then reactivate the "real" schools, shut down the spare schools, and now all the students once again are attending the school nearest to where they live. This needs to be done 2-3 times a year if you regularly are forming new households with student homemakers.
