Everyone but the Critter is sick

Nothing for today, everyone's sick. I got all of the farm chores and off to work, but the Lady of the House has food poisoning. I'll be back to this on Tuesday.

Kits, brooding hens, and planning for an overwhelmingly busy season.

I figured I'd open with a good shot of Dawn's Daughter's kits. Still searching for a name for her by the way so if you have any suggestions pass them on. As you can tell they are doing well. What I don't have is solid weight charts because this weekend was crazy busy, and I neglected to get weights. This morning was also a running way behind day so I don't have them from today either. I'll try to get back to that tomorrow, but no promises since there are some changes going on right now.

Before I move on to everything else though I figured I'd mention that Streak who bred with Remington Steel had her kits. She had 3 big kits, one of whom was born dead. A second of them died Sunday, probably pulled out on the wire still latched on which is unfortunate. With the other deaths in the shared nest with Splash, the nest as a whole is down to  7 between both. Twilight's nest on the other hand is going strong with 7 kits that are doing Just fine as we expect from Twilight. They're big, strong, and move too fast for me to get any decent photos of them to share today for which I am sorry. I'll try to have photos of Twilight's babies for Thursday, but again, no promises.

Splash's litter, snow, and a chicken in on the game.

It's nice to have lots of babies on the ground again, especially at this point where we're watching them get bigger day by day. These are the three that Dawn's Daughter gave birth to.

 I'm actually going to be soliciting everyone for input on naming Dawn's daughter. We've mostly stuck to lighting phenomenon for naming our rabbits, but we're happy to branch out with Dawn's daughter. So far her babies are doing incredibly well. Today at 5 days old they are 116, 111, and 106 grams. That's an average weight of 111.00 grams, and an excellent growth rate of 113.65%. For 3 babies an excellent growth rate is to be expected, but we also have Splash and Dorado's litter on the ground right now, and some time soon we're expecting Twilight and Streak's litters to hit the ground which should be good. There's a lot more baby rabbit photos below the cut.

Surprise kits, disassembling, and garlic sprouting.

Surprise, rabbit kits already! We were expecting our first litters on the 22nd and the 23rd, but it turns out I was correct that I took Dawn's son out of the hutch with her and her daughter later than I should have. Interestingly enough, it wasn't Dawn that was bred, it was her daughter. Fortunately she was old enough I don't feel bad that she's having kits. There are only 3 kits, but they're all healthy. They were born 76, 76, and 69 grams. Today they were 90, 89, and 87 grams just after feeding so they are doing well. We are expecting 2 sets of kits tomorrow or the next day, and another set the day after. We'll see how that goes, but we should have lots of baby rabbit pics. That said, we had a lot other than that going on over the weekend.

What did we learn from our first big hutch.

I'd like to start with an apology for the photo quality, I didn't have time to get photos with a real camera today so this is busted iPad photos. It'll work for getting the point across at least. Today I want to talk about a couple things, but the first thing I want to do is talk about what we've learned from our first grow out hutch, and the things that I want to do to modify it. If you haven't been following since then this was the construction post for the grow out hutch.
Before going on to talk about the grow out hutch, and learning experiences from it I'm going to touch on our seed starts. Obviously our peppers are doing well, and we started them very early given the short season. Just this past weekend we started the tomatoes, and last night when I took a look, a bunch of seedlings have started their thready sprouts. I'm really happy to see them coming up so quickly, and so many. Looks like I dropped some extra multiples beyond the two I intended to toss in to each seedling pot which is normal. No matter how closely I work to try to only drop one or two seeds in a hole I always end up with some extra seedlings per hole which is fine since I'm going to be splitting them out to larger pots anyhow. Just wanted to touch on that briefly, before going back to talking about learning from the grow out hutch.

Seedlings, starts, soil, and the winds of fortune.

It's a rainy, and kind of gross day with the volume of mud out there, but it is most certainly spring now. The Earth is beginning to thaw, and soon I think we'll start to see growing and living things even outside of our little indoor start. As you can see though, the indoor starts are doing quite well. I honestly should probably pot them up now since many of those little potlings have too many seedlings in them, and we don't want them to be entangled any more than they already are.

Lady Nature isn't done with us yet, delaying plans.

The Lady Nature has decided to remind us once more that she's not to be ignored, and that things will be as they will be. The thing that is a little harder to tell from this photo is that this isn't snow, it's a mix of snow and hail that's about boot toe deep. Mostly just an inconvenience, and if I admit it to myself, somewhat pretty. The real problem is that we still haven't been able to do any spring cleaning, and the area is a mess which needs to be rectified soon.

Ground, chickens, and an influx of blog visitors.

Alleluia, we can see ground on the slopes!

I'd like to take a moment to welcome those of you that found us through r/homestead yesterday, I'm glad to have you here, and I hope you stick around. Feel free to ask questions, comment, and enjoy.

Back to the ground though. The slopes are the first areas we see dirt other than where we shoveled, that's normal. I was looking back through, and despite how cold it has felt this winter, we're not far behind our norm if you look back to 2013 around this time, though 2012 snow was already long gone by this point. Either way, we're starting to get the world back from the snow.

A busy time to get back in the saddle.

Today on Hillside Homestead, we've been very busy things that are a bit out of the ordinary. Specifically the Lady of the House is preparing for selling her art, and a new genetics centered collectible/game at Anime Boston. I also had a wisdom tooth extracted yesterday which is somewhat distracting as well. The up shot of that is, no new photos for today which I've been really trying to keep from happening since I've been trying to make sure to give the blog the attention it deserves consistently. I also wanted to take a moment to do a monthly mention of the Patreon and Amazon Wishlist links off to the right, and thank everyone for reading, and their support.

Below the cut I'm going to be talking about getting back to breeding rabbits, and thoughts about that.