Fuzz & Buzz Farms: Homesteading with Goats, Bees, Gardening & More in New Mexico
Welcome to Fuzz & Buzz Farms!
Meet the Goat-Wrangling, Bee-Keeping Duo Behind Fuzz & Buzz Farms
We're a small, vibrant homestead featuring a local honey bee apiary, a pasture of friendly, show-quality Nubian goats, and a market garden grown with organic practices. We're Ronak and Holly—the farmers behind the buzz—and we spend most of our days building DIY upgrades, fencing new pastures, and making life better for our animal residents. Around here, we believe knowledge is power, so this blog is our way of sharing everything we've learned (and are still learning) with anyone curious about farm life. So hold your horses (if you’ve got any), fire up your tractor, and come along for some fun farm talk (and to meet the local residents)!
Our farm is small, but it grows a little more each year—just like our knowledge! Every day is a new adventure, and our various animals take us along for the ride with their shenanigans. Between magically appearing bees (swarm season is here!), baby goat bleatings (weaning time!) and fighting in the gardens (those darn squirrels…), Fuzz & Buzz stays pretty busy. In our down time, after an emergency, or before a new project (and sometimes in the middle of one), we work on learning new things that would help us for the future or to learn from the past. This blog will be filled with our musings. What should we have known? What could we do better? Why didn’t this thing work? My goat looks weird. Help! What do I do? And many more adventures! As our blog grows, we’ll be organizing these into helpful guides—like how to start a backyard apiary, goat care 101, and even a gardener’s survival guide for the East Mountains! You’ll be able to learn as we do (or did) and, hopefully, you’ll be inspired for your own new adventures as well!
Life on the Farm
Life on our farm is anything but ordinary! From a quirky herd of Nubian goats to our buzzing apiary and everything in between, here's a peek into daily life at Fuzz & Buzz Farms—where New Mexico homesteading is full of fur, fluff, and fresh veggies.
Our Livestock Guardians: the Rescue Horse & Great Pyrenees Trio
So let’s get started on those introductions! The first residents of Fuzz & Buzz Farms were actually a cranky old rescue horse and her trusty Livestock Guard Dog. Meet Socks & Josefina! Socks is 31 years old and spends her days munching on alfalfa mush (she doesn’t have any teeth!) and tumbleweeds while Josefina, or Jo, lays diligently by her side.
Jojo is a Great Pyrenees fluffball that loves to fend off howling coyotes with her mighty bark and chase cars along the edge of the pasture (unless it’s too hot, then she’d rather hang out in the shade). Socks & Jo were recently joined by a new pasture pal, Kenai, another Great Pyrenees. Kenai is in training, so he only works the night shift learning from Jo how to guard Socks and her Nubian charges with a fence between them. Maybe in a few years they’ll all be able to hang out together, but Kenai has a lot of training to do before then.
Our Nubian Goats on the Homestead: The Fuzz
The next residents on the farm are the beautiful, majestic, graceful Nubian goats that joined Fuzz & Buzz last year. Just kidding! Nubians are loud, funny, and sometimes bratty little things, but Holly adores them to death. This year Fuzz & Buzz is up to 8 Nubian residents with more to come in the future.
These pesky little creatures give the family endless entertainment and provide selective gardening services (i.e. they mow the lawn and eat all the spiky plants that get in your socks)! Additionally, their manure and hay waste (which is a lot…) makes fantastic fertilizer for the sometimes poor quality New Mexican soil. In the future, they will also provide the family with fresh dairy and the ability to make fresh cheese and any other fun cooking adventures that Ronak and Holly might desire!
Beekeeping at Fuzz & Buzz: The Buzz
Moving on then. The next residents belong to the Apiary! As of a couple of nights ago, we now have three lovely beehives full of thousands of honey bees. It’s swarm season in New Mexico, and Ronak has been the recipient of two surprise swarms this year and is likely to end up with another hive here soon too! Fortunately for Holly’s heart, Ronak’s bees have so far agreed that we can all be friends. They hang out with us in the gardens, pollinating produce and wildflowers alike, and buzz around curiously (sometimes too curiously…) whenever we’re out harvesting or mulching or any other of the myriad of chores that continuously awaits us.
The Upcoming Duck Crew
And for the final, soon to be residents of the farm— ducks! We’re in the middle of attempting to hatch our first ducklings. We’ll be raising a combination of Welsh Harlequin and Cayuga ducks at the Snuggly Duckling (our duck coop!). These little guys will forage freely during the day under the watchful eyes of our guardian dogs, then snuggle down safely each night. We’ve got about a week left to see how things turn out, but after that, we will have duck residents again. Later this year, we’ll also be working on installing a much upgraded duck pond from the last time we had ducks.
East Mountain Gardening Adventures: Flowers, Veggies & Pollinators
The last thing to note about the farm is the extensive pollinator flower gardens and the market garden that continues to grow yearly! Each year we expand our flower selections, both bulb and seed, and give the bees (and butterflies!) a wider variety to choose from. Our market garden has also grown substantially and is approaching the point where, possibly as early as next year, we will begin selling to the public. These past few years we have been experimenting with what works and learning what doesn’t. We’ll eventually try to write up a “Welcome to the East Mountains Gardening Guide” because, whoo!, the mountains are something else! No rain, too much rain, ahh, the hail!, late frosts, even later frosts, and early frosts plus all the pests certainly make gardening out here a wild ride.
What’s Next on the Homestead? Learn Alongside Us
We hope you’ll stick around and learn with us as we continue our adventures! Look for upcoming posts on a variety of topics like beekeeping fundamentals and everything you need to know getting started (and what comes after), managing goats and how to care for them, native (and non-native) plants of New Mexico and everything you ever wanted to know about them, ducks, ducks, and more ducks, gardening tips & tricks and more fun info! Want to learn more about homesteading in New Mexico? Subscribe to our newsletter for fresh tips on beekeeping, goat care, and growing your own food in the mountains—plus plenty of cute goat photos!