Welcome To Our Homestead

Hello everyone, my name is Sally, if you read the About Us section of our website it will catch you up to date to where we are now.

I will be adding a lot of blog posts over the next little while and hoping that you all enjoy them and come back to visit often.

In 2017 when my husband gave word that he would be moving to the East Coast of Canada for his work I was less than thrilled. I had four beautiful Pygmy goats who I loved very much, three miniature horses, more than a dozen laying hens and some racing pigeons. I had to find homes for them all. And that made me very sad. Our house took awhile to sell, what felt like forever.

My husband arrived in New Brunswick in April of 2017 and the children and I stayed behind with the house listed for sale. We sold our animals and had hoped the process wouldn't take long. We waited and waited. Finally in August 2017 I said we would move here to be with him regardless if the house sold or not. Because I wanted to make sure we got the children registered in schools and not switching schools partway through the year. That was my biggest fear and I didn't want that to happen. We decided that we would take a low ball offer on our home just to get it sold and that's exactly what we did. The day the truck packed with all of our stuff headed down the road was the day where it all felt real. We stayed for a few more days before we headed out on our final journey to find a new home. Once in New Brunswick we lived in a hotel for a few days waiting for our house rental to be ready for us.

While waiting for the sale of our home we needed to rent a small, very small, four bedroom house. We were there for just over one month. Then we finally took possession of our new home, a big raised bungalow on 21 acres with a piece of the river running through the backyard. I love our home, it used to be an old Christian Retreat, built 40 years ago and lived in by the same ladies all those years. We feel such pride in this home being our home. When we purchased the home it was a large, 7 bedroom home. One of the bedrooms served as an office with another little office off to the back, which is joined to the master bedroom via one large walk through closet. It had four bathrooms but we quickly removed one and turned it into a spacious closet for our eldest daughter.

We relocated our kitchen from upstairs to the basement where there was a kitchen type setup that was never actually completed to be a kitchen. They held church meetings and functions in the basement so everything was set up nicely down there. When we decided to turn our upstairs kitchen into a bakeshop and reopen our artisan store on the upper level of our home it was so that I can stay home from the traditional workforce and be at the needs of our children more readily. With doing that we installed new flooring upstairs, and downstairs. We are renovating another one of the basement bedrooms to turn it into a large walk-in pantry/cold storage room. I will try to find old photos that I have taken through-out the process and share those with everyone as well. I will likely end up doing individual posts about each room and it's renovations on here at some point in the future and as we progress with them.

We have really decided to crack down on all of our dreams and goals and start making them happen now. We have a ten year plan that will turn these beautiful 21 acres into a lovely hobby farm, homestead, dream home for someone else. We love our home and love the location but we really would like more land and more animals to farm and help cultivate the land bringing out it's true beauty.

This year we will be welcoming a LGD into the fold, he is a Maremma and Great Pyrenees mixed pup. Our middle daughter has decided she wants to be the one to give him his name...

...and let me tell you...

...it's cheesy...

She wants to name our cute little boy Queso.

Queso will be helping guard our chickens. Although we've not had issues with our chickens on the other three farms we've had, other than a landlords dog once, at this location we seem to have a large fox issue. They have taken more birds than I can count and I am really not happy about that! Along side protecting our chickens, Queso is going to be a guardian to the goats that we plan on adding to the farm this year.

We get eggs from our chickens, and we do eat the birds as well. I have a very good friend who comes out and does the slaughtering for us. I haven't quite been able to do it as of yet, but also never really tried. She was a farmer back home in Ontario and she is very well versed at the whole job. It's win-win. But this year my husband and I will both be getting our hands dirty and starting to cull them ourselves.

From our goats, we are planning on milking them to drink the milk but also for use to make cheese and soaps. We are searching for Nigerian Dwarf Goats so if you know anyone who's selling them in Atlantic Canada please leave a comment, I would love to take a look at their website, Facebook page, Instagram or whatever.

We are also planning to get some turkeys, pigs, Dexter cattle, ducks, geese and I feel like I'm forgetting something... Oh, yes, rabbits. My husband is very excited to get some rabbits, tan the hide and make some nice fur mittens. All of these animals will serve a food purpose on our farm, and may even have more than one use. You'll have to stay tuned to see what all happens.

We have watched a lot of YouTube videos lately on all of these things and I must say the rabbit hide tanning ones have been pretty interesting. I am looking forward to seeing what we can accomplish in these next few years and wonder what will happen in the future on our homestead!

Thank you for joining me today and reading this very long post. This one is kind of more of a breakdown of our plans than anything else. A little more information about us as I'm hoping to get to know our readers and would like them to know us as much as possible.

Until next time... Happy Homesteading!

                                                    ~Sally