Late summer garden, a visitor, and new litters of babies!

Kits have been born! These three are Dawn's current set of kits, I'm not sure if she was done fully yet, so I'm hoping to see a few more in her nest.  Twilight also kindled today, but I wasn't going to reach in there and try to get kits out without a second pair of hands, and the Lady of the House is not feeling well today. She's doing ok, just a bit under the weather so I was on my own for kit checking. So, let's talk about what's been going on other than babies being born.

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So far yesterday and today have not been my day. I have content for the post, but I just need to find time to get the pictures up and the post written.

Preview:
Bear paw print
Tomatoes going everywhere
Wasps are gone (for now)
Bunny pictures.

I'll try to get this up tonight. Realistically, it may be Thursday. I'm sorry.

Quick hit: The Natural Food Label

I generally try to avoid politics in the blog, and I'm sorry to go there today. However I think that this is an important issue in food politics. The article I've linked below explains the situation well, in short, we need to change or disallow entirely the "Natural" and "All Natural" labels. At this point they are totally unregulated, and are intended to be misleading in an already difficult to navigate world for those who don't have access to fresh foods. Please take a read, and act if you are inspired to.

https://takeaction.takepart.com/actions/stop-confusing-consumers-ban-the-natural-label?cmpid=tp-ad-foodinc-fb-actions

Wasps in the grow out hutch, seeking advice.

No photos again today. The main thing on my mind, and a definite plan distraction recently is the wasps that moved into the empty grow out hutch. I'd love to have gotten photos, but they're angry. Last year some wasps lived in the grow out hutch, we co existed peacefully, and I let them live there for the year. Come winter I took the nest and flung it deep into the woods. I don't really mind wasps, they have a purpose, and I suspect they are why we have so few horn worms.

Unfortunately this nest of wasps that has moved in is Angry.

I don't know if any of you have bothered to learn flying critter with a stinger language, but it can be useful. The really relevant one for this particular situation is, if a bee or wasp comes up and headbutts you in the face, it's not actually stupid, drunk, or even aggressive. You're too near its nest, and it's asking you politely to stop so it doesn't have to kill you. Well, it thinks it is going to kill you, when in fact barring allergies it is going to inconvenience you and convince you to kill it and all of its sisters.

Back to the wasps in the hutch. Last year they'd head butt me when I was in close proximity to the nest, and would then back off, and we'd work around each other. The ones in there this year head butt me for opening the door to the hutch. That doesn't work unfortunately. So, they need to go. Unfortunately my best plan so far has involved using a Tupperware container. At night when it's dark so they won't see me, put it over the nest, drag it down the inside of the roof to knock the nest free, then when all of them are settled on the bottom of the box, quickly pull it off and put the lid on.

See the problem here? I sure did after the first try on a smaller nest of 3 wasps. It worked by the way, no stings. Still a bad plan.

Anyone have any suggestions that doesn't involve using neuro toxins in the grow out hutch for the baby rabbits?

Thanks in advance!

An intentional community concept brainstorm

Things have been a bit hairy since last Thursday to say the least. I don't have photos today of any sort for which I apologize. All I have is a landscape by the Lady of the House.

What I'm going to talk about today is a concept I've been kicking around that the Lady of the House tentatively supports based on finding solutions to some of the glaring problems, and resolution of some details. The idea is of building an intentional community based around ethical living and eating, art, and feminism, without rejecting technology.

That's a mouth full. How can we pare that down?

An intentional community based around food, ethics, and art.

Ground running tomatoes, peppers, and a turtle.

Alright, so it's not yogurt. Again. I'm sorry! I didn't have the time to get the photos off the card for that. Last night ended up being sort of a long one, and I ended up with less time than expected. The Lady of the House and I have been considering goats for some time, and some friends due to personal circumstances need help with their goats for a while. So, we're going to be helping out 3 times a week with goat feeding for some Boer goats. We'll see how it goes! Lesson one, don't go head to head with a buck. Also, don't go back of knee to head with a buck. Really, don't go back of knee to anything with any creature, it's a bad plan. But, back at home, we're starting to feed greens we're %100 sure of again. The rabbits are happy.

Driveway done (mostly), and poison plants.

Well, we finished the driveway. Of course I don't have photos of any of the work, or the completed result because I forgot to get the completed part, and most of the time working was in the rain, or my hands were shaking too badly to get photos. So instead, here's a bunny.

Well, really it's a couple bunnies but you're most interested in the kit in the foreground. This is the smaller of Dawn's two kits. It's hard to get good scale on it because Dawn's so far from the camera. Anyhow, both of them are doing very well!

As for the driveway, in 2 days of work we moved ~18.5 tons of crush which comes out to about 15 cubic yards into ruts, and spread it across the driveway to crown it. The only tools we have for it are a digging shovel, a short digging shovel, and an iron rake. Appropriate tools for this, transfer shovel (broken fiberglass handle), bobcat, tractor, earth mover. I suspect mule or horse team would also be useful for this. Either way, without those we just did what we could, and for the most part it worked out. I really wish instead of 6, 3 - 4 ton piles the driver had been able to slowly scatter it down the driveway, but we got what we got, and can now use the driveway. It didn't even wash away in the recent hard rains!

Below the cut I'm going to talk more about how the baby bunnies are doing, which has both good, and learning experiences on our part.

Driveway, step one.

Step one of course being, the beginning. And in the beginning, there were trenches.

It may be difficult to tell from that photo, but that's a 100 foot long trench, for most of it it's only a few inches deep. Below the cut I'm going to get to the worse areas, and then Step 2, delivery of raw materials.

A quick overview

 So, as I said last Thursday, we're back!!! I figured I should start off with a quick review of what's going on. Sorry about the photo quality, I didn't have the time to get photos and edit them. So, instead we're going to have meh quality photos. Ahhh well, at least it's a cute young bunny. There are more baby bunny photos below the cut.