Okay… wow.
It’s June already.
Half the year is gone, and honestly, what the heck? Somehow we blinked, survived kidding season, mud season, fake spring, second winter, and now apparently summer is trying to show up.
This spring has felt like a bit of a roller coaster weather-wise, even more than usual. Now, we haven’t lived in New Brunswick forever — this month actually marks three years since we moved here. We took possession of the house on June 14th, which feels wild to think about. In some ways, it feels like we just got here, and in other ways, it feels like we’ve lived this version of life forever.
The temperatures this spring have been all over the place. Daytime highs have ranged anywhere from about 16 degrees, and according to the forecast, we’re supposed to be hitting 27 or 28 degrees sometime this coming week.
And yet…
This morning — and I’m writing this on Monday — we woke up at 6 a.m. to it being one degree outside.
One degree.
In June.
Holy cow.
I ended up bringing all of the plants we had sitting out on the deck back inside, along with my little seedling trays and their humidity domes, because there was absolutely no way I was risking all that work for a near frost.
That said, the homestead survived, the animals didn’t seem to care nearly as much as I did, and hopefully warmer weather is actually here to stay this time. Around here, spring seems to enjoy keeping us humble.
Speaking of the animals, let’s start with the goats.
We officially have the kids we plan to part with listed for sale this year, which includes Loki, Finn, Stewie, and one doeling — Winnie, Missy’s little girl. So far, though, selling goats has been… underwhelming.
I cross-posted the listings to Facebook groups and Kijiji, and while I’ve gotten a handful of messages, it’s mostly been things like, “Are these pets?” or “Are they still available?” I answer, and then… nothing.
Crickets.
Selling animals in this economy seems to be a little challenging.
At this point, I’m debating whether to reduce the price or simply keep them and raise the boys for meat. We’ll see what happens. Maybe it’s serendipitous, and they’re meant to stay a little longer. Or maybe everyone is just broke right now.
Either way, there’s no huge rush.
The milking process, however, has been going really well.
The goats are officially trained to the new stanchion now, which has made a huge difference in the morning routine. They know exactly what’s happening and jump up on their own, which is pretty amazing considering how dramatic some of them were about the whole process at first.
The trick, though, is speed.
If you’re not quick enough to get grain into the bowl, they get bored and decide the whole arrangement no longer interests them, jump down, and occasionally cause a near-disaster involving the milking machine and all the supplies. So now we’ve learned to have grain ready to go before switching out the goats.
Preparation is everything.
The new stanchion itself has made such a difference this year. It has adjustable height, a quick-lock head gate, and overall just makes milking so much easier.
Well… except for Ally.
Ally still likes to keep things exciting.
She bucks hard enough that she can actually pop the head gate open, which was a fun discovery. Thankfully, Addy figured out that adding a little bungee cord solves the problem, so now we have a system that works pretty well.
Other than that, everybody seems happy, healthy, and growing like weeds.
We were also able to pick up more hay from the local co-op. Definitely not the cheapest option, but it was available, easy to get, and sometimes convenience wins. So the goats are stocked up again for at least another week and a half, which feels like a win considering how much hay hunting becomes a thing this time of year.
Last weekend — or maybe technically a couple of weekends ago now, the weekend right after our last update — was the annual (or biannual?) U-Sale at the co-op farm store in Fredericton.
We made sure to get there early, thinking we were being very prepared. We rolled in at about 7:55 a.m., feeling pretty good about ourselves because the sale opened at 8:00.
Apparently, everyone else had the exact same idea.
The parking lot was absolutely packed.
People were already walking away carrying crates full of livestock before the sale had even officially started. We didn’t even manage to park in the co-op parking lot and ended up squeezing into the dealership parking lot beside it since they were closed for the day.
We hurried in because, obviously, we needed to see what everybody had brought.
And there was everything.
Goat kids, geese, ducks, chickens — both adult birds and endless baby chicks — guinea fowl, seedlings, homemade jams and preserves, rabbits, and lots of quail.
Thankfully, rabbits were one of the things we were specifically hoping to find.
If you’ve been following the blog lately, you already know why.
We were also quietly in the market for quail.
Okay, mostly me.
Addy just kindly goes along with my increasingly questionable livestock decisions, which deserve some appreciation.
We ended up coming home with two rabbits.
The first is a New Zealand cross with Rex and has what they call a broken pelt — basically black and white spotting. Around here, Bella calls them “cow bunnies,” which feels pretty accurate.
The second rabbit is a pure Silver Fox rabbit, and she’s gorgeous. She was only about 11 weeks old when we picked her up, so she won’t be ready to join any breeding plans until the fall, which honestly works out timing-wise anyway.
Of course, new animals need names.
The Silver Fox rabbit, which has darker fur with little flecks of silver throughout, became Foxy.
And the spotted rabbit became Roxy.
So naturally, we now have Foxy and Roxy.
Very creative, I know.
And then there were the quail.
Technically, I only planned to maybe look at quail.
But then I found a woman selling week-old Coturnix quail chicks…
And she had nineteen of them.
So naturally, I bought all nineteen.
Because apparently we needed nineteen quail.
When we got home, though, I had a bit of a scare.
One of the little quail chicks looked really rough. He was stretched out with his eyes mostly closed, barely moving, and at first I genuinely thought he had passed away during the trip home.
But when I picked him up, he was still breathing.
Every once in a while, he’d kind of gasp and open his tiny little beak, and I thought, Okay… what exactly do you do for a baby quail?
Because these things are tiny.
Like, alarmingly tiny.
So I went into problem-solving mode.
I grabbed a syringe, filled it with room-temperature water, and carefully got him to drink a little bit. I could see his crop filling, which felt encouraging. Then I separated him from the others because, if you know quail, they are not exactly emotional support animals. The others would have just walked all over him.
I tucked him into one of those little cardboard berry crates inside the brooder where it was warm and sunny and basically hoped for the best.
About twenty minutes later, I came back, and there he was.
Standing.
Then ten minutes after that, he was peeping around as if absolutely nothing had happened.
Eventually, we let him back in with the others, and honestly, we couldn’t even tell which one he was anymore.
So that felt like a pretty big win.
They are surprisingly hardy little birds.
On the garden front, we’ve been slowly but surely working away.
And when I say we, I mostly mean Addy.
He’s been doing a ton of work with weeding, prepping beds, and building new growing areas while I bounce around helping where I can.
One project we finally tackled was getting rid of the old triangle tractor that had been sitting around forever. Technically, it was more of a chicken tractor, though people use them for ducks and rabbits too. We originally got it for free years ago when Addy trailered home a whole pile of old barn wood from someone moving.
Well, eventually finally happened.
We got it mostly dismantled and hauled away, although we did keep the floor wire because it’ll come in handy for the rabbit colony project we’re hoping to try.
We’ve also added a few new things to the garden.
Unfortunately, not every update is a happy one.
The wildly inconsistent weather finally took out all of the pepper plants Addy had been carefully tending downstairs in the basement grow room. He had even up-potted them all and babied them along, but I think they had simply reached the point where they really wanted a commercial greenhouse.
Sadly… we don’t own one of those.
We decided to gamble and move them outside, hoping for the best.
The frost won.
So unfortunately, the peppers are gone.
But in true homestead fashion, you regroup and plant something else.
Addy replaced them with kale, which is looking really good so far, and he also planted cilantro. He ordered heavier-duty weed cloth too for the pathways and eventually the floor of the high tunnel so hopefully we spend a little less time battling weeds this summer.
At this point, we’ve got around seven beds planted, which means we’ve officially entered evening watering season.
After warmer days, we head outside, water everything, see what survived the weather, and spend a little time wandering through the garden.
And honestly, I love it.
There’s something really therapeutic about being out there this time of year.
A little while back, we bought some bare-root strawberry plants with big hopes of eventually having a proper strawberry patch. They ended up living in the house for a while until Addy finished building the slightly raised bed for them.
Thankfully, last weekend he got it done and filled it with topsoil, so I finally got to plant them.
We ended up with twenty-seven strawberry plants in total.
A couple of them I’m still a little suspicious of and not fully convinced they’ll survive, but strawberries are practically weeds around here, right? So we planted them anyway and hoped for the best.
The bed itself is topped with good soil, but underneath is composted goat bedding and straw from the goat area, which should hopefully make for some very happy strawberries.
At least, that’s the theory.
Everything is planted now, and I’m really hoping we get a nice strawberry harvest because we absolutely love strawberries around here.
Fresh, frozen, dehydrated — I’ll happily take them any way I can get them.
A quick little garden win is the rhubarb.
If you remember from the last blog, we transplanted our huge established rhubarb plant because its raised bed was basically disintegrating.
Well, I’m happy to report it actually seems to have recovered from the transplant shock.
As long as we keep it watered, it looks like we might still get a harvest this year after all.
And, thanks to Addy splitting the original plant, we technically have two rhubarb plants now.
So, future us may have even more rhubarb than we know what to do with.
Otherwise, for the most part, life on the Funny Farm has settled into a pretty steady rhythm lately.
We get up, milk goats, feed everybody, go to work, come home, feed everybody again, make dinner, watch something inside for a little bit, head back out to tuck everybody in for the night, and then do it all again the next day.
Busy.
A little repetitive.
But in a comforting sort of way.
One project we finally got around to finishing was the fridge swap.
You might remember that a little while back we bought a bigger French-door fridge with the freezer on the bottom for inside the house because we desperately needed more room.
Well, after procrastinating for a while, we finally got around to moving everything around.
And let me tell you…
Apparently, if you leave an unplugged fridge sitting closed for too long…
Nature happens.
Very unfortunate, mouldy nature.
So there was a lot more cleaning involved than expected.
Once cleaned up, though, we moved the old fridge into the sunroom, where it officially became our milk fridge.
And trust me, we needed one.
At this point, we’re getting nearly a gallon of milk every single day — roughly four litres — and if I don’t stay on top of making cheese, yogurt, or otherwise using it up, things pile up fast.
At one point, I think I had four gallons sitting in the kitchen fridge.
Four.
Gallons.
Something had to change.
The old, unreliable sunroom fridge that barely worked has officially been retired, although not completely. Instead of hauling it away, we’re going to gut it and turn it into mouse-proof grain storage, which I thought was actually a pretty brilliant idea after seeing someone do it online.
The only hiccup so far is that our “new” milk fridge in the sunroom suddenly seems to have commitment issues and doesn’t always want to keep its door shut after being moved.
I’m blaming the uneven sunroom floor.
That feels fair.
But overall, it feels really good to have kitchen space back and not have our everyday fridge entirely devoted to milk storage.
And that’s pretty much the highlight reel from the last little while here on the Funny Farm. Somehow, between freezing mornings in June, goats that have finally figured out milking, surprise livestock purchases, baby quail drama, garden projects, strawberries, rhubarb recovery, and reorganizing the entire fridge situation, life has stayed busy — but good.
As always, thank you so much for making it all the way to the bottom and following along with our little corner of chaos. I genuinely appreciate everyone who takes the time to read, comment, message, and cheer us on while we continue figuring this whole homesteading thing out one project (or livestock impulse purchase) at a time.
Hopefully by next update, we’ll have even more garden progress, maybe some successful goat sales, and fewer weather surprises.
Until next time ❤️
Really enjoyed reading about your homestead!