Reality Check: We need help

So, having done a farm update, it's time to do an update on our lives since we're in transition. Why is this post covered in art rather than homestead photos? A lot of the transition focuses on the Lady of the House. The major information. The Lady of the House is 32 weeks pregnant, getting on towards 33 weeks pregnant. Her layoff from her job of 3 years is today, and no one will hire a 33 week pregnant person. Combine that with me having been laid off from one of my jobs a month ago, and we're in trouble, like take home below mortgage per month, before gas and food. Read below to see how you can help us.

Overdue update

A new day, a new set of baby bunny faces. Well, really right now it's the same set of faces, but as they grow so fast it can feel like a whole new set of faces. Above are three of Twilight's current brood.  Much like their mother they are very engaged with anything involving food. That naturally includes us since we're involved with the appearance of food. I wanted a photo of Twilight hovering over them, but all of them were blurry dark gray mountains that didn't look so good sadly.  Overall, Twilight's kits are growing the crazy rate we expect, and we're happy to see that. Everyone is going to get re bred soon, so they'll only be with their mom for another few weeks for which she will be profoundly grateful, the're eating her food!

Visiting Wheel-View Farm

The Lady of the House and I went to Wheel-View Farm for their open house day, and wanted to share some photos and thoughts about their farm and overall operation. Their site has a lot of good information including about the environmental benefits of grass fed beef farming. They also have a lot of other photos, all of the ones we have up for this post are our own photos taken by the Lady of the House when we visited. I think if you just want a summary it is the idyllic pastoral farm that one imagines, but rarely actually existed if it ever did.

Discussion: Whole Foods rabbit care standards.

I could subtitle this, rabbit production done right on an institutional scale, but out of reach for small operations. Before I get to the rest of this post which is going to be a bit long probably, I want to note that I'm not a fan of a 40 degree morning mid August.

There has been a lot of uproar from some pet rabbit groups about the inclusion of rabbit meat for sale at Whole Foods Market in some places. Right now it is a non universal program based on the local availability of rabbit to those stores. http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/department/article/rabbit One of the things you can note in that link is a link to their animal welfare standards. If you haven't clicked through to read it here.

I read through it, and it isn't overly legalese in its presentation. It is in fact a clear document stating the requirements for keeping rabbits for sale to Whole Foods. I'm going to start with the ethical side of the keeping of the animals, and move on to the difficulties to the farm after I have covered the pure ethics and animal welfare side. I'm going to go through in some detail below the cut.

Back to the normal life, plants, and rabbits.

The Lady of the House is back, and I'm very happy! The rabbits are still very active and hard to get good photos of, but at least I was able to get a couple of the Lady of the House holding onto fast moving babies so I could get photos. The one above is from Sunshine's litter since I still haven't gone after the wasp nest in Dawn's hutch. Below the cut will be more baby photos.

A merry chase

I figured today was a good day for baby bunny photos, unfortunately I forgot that when trying to get photos on a rainy day you A: need to be out of the woods, and B: a corollary, you need a second pair of hands. The Lady of the House is out of town right now since she was selling at Otakon this past weekend. This promptly led to a game of find the blue gray 2 week old rabbit in the tall grass and raspberry bushes. Before doing the cut, I assure those of you who just came for the baby bunny photos, all turned out well, and no babies were harmed, and there will be more (well, one more) photo below the cut.