Quick, look at the cute! Ignore the man behind the keyboard!

Today's post isn't going to have as much substance in it as I'd like since I've been sleeping very poorly lately. What I really wanted to talk about was a really awesome talk by Marion Nestle the Lady of the House located, and the information in it. Instead I'm going to coast by on cute rabbits, and getting into winter prep.

First things first, the time is coming for the teenagers sadly. We are going to start with the large males first, and probably aren't going to do all of them at once since that just makes for a really unpleasant day, and with only one day off a week I do want to get to spend part of it with the Lady of the House without having anything we have to do! As we're going through we are going to be seeing if either of the blue kits are female, we could definitely use more blues in our program. Ideally both blues are female and we can do something with them like we did with Halley and Comet this year. Halley and Comet are all well and good, but blues grow faster, so if we're going to have season breeders they should probably be blues if we can swing it. We haven't done thorough sex checking on the teens though at this point. They are all very friendly though and kind of hilarious to watch as they to about their days. It is interesting to me to see which ones will abandon the pellets to eat greens or hay preferentially. The blues definitely are more inclined to focus on the fresh greens than the cremes, but all of them just eat anything put in front of them. One thing I am very much enjoying about rabbits is when I stick my hand holding a food bowl in I know I'm not going to get accidentally nipped even in an absolute crush of rabbit bodies competing for the first bite out of the bowl. I'm actually very pleased with the hutch they are in other than the poop on the upper level thing I've mentioned before and will be fixing once I move them out.

Speaking of greens, Twilight and her kits have been getting more of the greens lately, and monster kit goes for it first and just sits there eating, from what I can tell, until it is gone. I've been pulling up the thorny weeds mostly lately while the smart weed recovers. Unlike the smart weed where they often leave the stems on the thorn bushes they eat every last bit. I have started thinking about what happens when winter comes in full bore and we don't have fresh greens for the rabbits, they really enjoy them, and they have significantly reduced our feed bills. Obviously over winter we will be using more hay, and will have fewer rabbits on hand since we won't be breeding over winter.
To close out today, it's time for the real cute photos of the day, the same black kit/creme kit pair from Tuesday. They seem to be best friends and hang out all the time. They're definitely near inseparable and are always found eating together like this.

So winter prep, that's what I was going to talk about! For one thing we need to do some trimming of  tree branches around the rabbit hutches so they don't funnel snow onto the hutches, or fall on the hutches. The other thing we need to do is make sure that under all of the hutches is fully cleared out. This isn't so much because we just want clear under the hutches, or even to collect the mess for next year both of which are true. During the winter we aren't going to be able to do clearing under the hutches as soon as it snows, so waste will pile up. We want to make absolutely certain that when that happens it doesn't become a major problem. We want to be able to come in to take care of it in the spring, not worry about trying to crack up frozen poop and hay piles to spread them out when it's below zero out. So we're going to be building up a waste/compost pile exclusively for rabbit poop and waste hay over the next month or so. On the non rabbit end I need to get on bucking and splitting firewood. Once I get all of it to length I can split it quickly enough, but we will arrange a weekend to just cut the trees down to size. Hopefully next week I will be less fatigued and will be able to get you better posts!

Edited to add: Apparently this is the 200th post! Kinda nuts. Here's hoping we've been interesting, helpful, and fun for everyone so far!