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.


 To start off our overview, rabbits.
The rabbits are doing quite well, and while we've been slow on breeding lately that's because we have lots left in the freezer, and just have been too busy to properly take care of more than we have been. Right now Dawn only has the two kits you see Left. Our new buck Herbie had been inside all winter, and we brought him outside the day before we went to breed him, and probably unsurprisingly he didn't breed particularly successfully producing those two, not getting a few does pregnant, and 7 kits with 5 surviving out of Splash one of our new does. Left you can see Splash, Streak, and 4 of the 5 babies. Normally with this bunch you'd only see 4 because the kit we've termed Adventure Bunny has somehow gotten out again, and is out gorging itself in the yard. This time Adventure Bunny is in there, and is actually the one off to the right that looks more like a fuzzy football than the other babies. If she's been out for more than about 12 hours she'll usually come right up to me to go back into the hutch. Last night around 23:00 just before we went to bed, I went out with the dog, put him back in, and sat out near her family's hutch for a while and she came right up to me after standing up to try to get back in for a few minutes. It's nice that she knows how to get home, but I do wish I could figure out a good way to keep her in! Spotting her getting out would be a good start, but I haven't managed that yet. On an individual level.
Does:
Dawn: 2 kits, bred to Herbie last week. Sunshine: No kits last breeding, bred to Herbie last week. Streak: No kits last breeding, bred to Herbie last week. Splash: 5 surviving kits, bred to Starry Night last week. Twilight: No kits last breeding, bred to Starry Night last week. Twilight's Daughter: Name suggestions appreciated! Hasn't accepted breeding yet.
Bucks:
Herbie: Happy, healthy, and loving being the lead buck for the moment.
Dorado: Happy, healthy, and not loving not being the back up buck for the moment since it means he hasn't gotten any breeding recently.
Starry Night: Nervous, healthy, and still terrified of Twilight, but he got over it enough to breed with her successfully despite her being a bit growly.

Due to our delays this year our next litter is going to be during HOT season, so we're just going to have to hope that our bucks don't develop heat sterility again because we don't like doing winter litters for a lot of reasons.

On a side note, the reason we have a lot of rabbit left is the Lady of the House during the first trimester of pregnancy didn't want to eat meat at all. If she could detect it, it wasn't getting eaten. Due to how I eat that put me barely eating any meat either, so we didn't go through much of our stock on anything but social currency uses of rabbit. We're starting to eat meat again, but it's still not a primary food for the Lady of the House.
On the non meat end, the yard is doing great, and the garden is doing well. We haven't had as much time to weed as we'd like, or as much time to dig as we'd like. This has led to some serious weeds, but we've managed to mulch and weed enough to keep the garden doing well. Above is the raised mound bed you saw us build just before winter last y ear. The tomatoes in it are doing crazy well. Somewhat better than the tomatoes elsewhere despite the addition of manure. I'd gotten photos of the front garden bed to show, but they didn't come out well enough to bother posting. I don't know enough about gardening to say they're doing %10 better, or %20 better, but definitely bigger to the point they Need trellising ASAP!
 The other things we're really proud of right now are our peppers. Left is a Czech Black pepper plant that we started inside, and it has already started fruiting! I've never had Czech Black peppers so I'm looking forward to trying them. Below is the poor Sweet Habenero plant we nursed through the winter under lights. The Lady of the House and I were joking that we've got the first set peppers in the valley, and we're not even in the valley! To be fair, I don't know if that's true, but we are happy that some of our peppers are doing well. Some of the others are being eaten by slugs and other miscellaneous bugs, but over all, they're doing well. We definitely started a few too many peppers, but that's ok, if we have too many peppers, I guarantee, we don't have too many peppers!

The rest of the garden is doing fairly well. We over extended in relation to what we could actually do this year. Thanks to the help of some friends we got some extra garden beds dug, so we have about 30 tomato plants, around 25 peppers, a few squash of various types, some broccoli, and our rampant kale that is in the process of going to seed. We probably aren't managing to do the potatoes we wanted to this year, we definitely aren't managing the corn. We do however have crazy amounts of raspberries, blackberries, and blueberries. I'm going to go into more detail about things as I get back into the swing of things. The next post I hope to do is about making yogurt which we tried out for the first time this week thanks to the generous gift from one of our wedding guests of a yogurt maker. It was about 30 minutes of paying attention, $5 of milk, $2 of jam and $1 of yogurt to make about $15 in flavored yogurt. Check in on Thursday to see that! Or more bunnies if I don't get time to edit the photos.