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.

Over the weekend we were out at Anime Boston, and thanks to a friend coming by on Saturday we didn't have to do multiple trips for animal care. The nice thing is that with the weather as it is we weren't worried about frozen water bottles, or sufficient feed being out for the chickens. As you can see Left they are now drinking at the drainage ditch up in the back of the yard. The interesting thing is that they do this preferentially to clean water provided in their run. I suspect just because they enjoy being out of the run and enjoying around the woods. When I let them out, they promptly follow me up the stairs, over the porch, and out and into the yard and around the rabbit hutches.
One of the really nice things about the rooster is that with him around all of the girls stick together as a group. The benefits to that are manifold. Safety, and ready counting of our chickens are the two that readily come to mind. I'm sure we'll see the others as life goes on around here, at least as long as he sticks around. Contrary to our first impressions of Mr. Bond he doesn't seem to be nearly as fearful as he was. Now he's just alert, and relatively friendly with us. He doesn't even seem to have problems with other humans which is a bonus because we've heard of roosters that can be problematic with guests from other friends that keep roosters. This is definitely an area that we are lucky in that we can have a rooster. In many areas near us roosters are flat out banned from home flocks which makes total sense to me given the noise level that our relatively quiet Mr. Bond can achieve, and I can say for certain that he isn't a particularly loud rooster.
The only down side we've seen so far to the rooster following us around any time he's out is just how far he's willing to follow, which of course means that the girls follow as well. As you can see here, he and the girls are with the Lady of the House as she was going down the driveway to show off just how well the driveway is doing even in the melt. At this point we barely have any ice left on the driveway, which is a great change for us from what it had been. Especially given that my father is going to be visiting this weekend. While we're up and down the luge regularly, and haven't fallen off the driveway this winter, it has been a wiser thing to not go up and down it for those that aren't very familiar with our driveway and its quirks. Some time soon we're going to need to get our hands on more crush stone so we can do a bit more repair on the driveway and fill in the ditches that you can see some of by the glaciation left in them. As we go on I'd like to stay ahead of the driveway instead of feeling behind the 8 ball on it constantly as we have in the past. Due to how much branch fall we've had this winter beyond just brush clearing this spring, we're going to have to get a lot of branches big and small out of the ditches.  I figure when the snow is actually gone we'll have a brush clearing, yard cleaning day followed by a fire pit.

On the side of the rabbits, we should be looking at litters within 2 weeks from now, or there about. I'm going to be getting Dawn and her daughter into a larger hutch shortly so I can breed them as well since we need to make up for the really bad season of breeding last year, and refill our freezer. We aren't out of rabbits yet, but we're definitely running short even with having barely eaten meat last year due to the Lady of the House not wanting it during pregnancy.

I'm hoping that we will have a very productive and successful season now that we have more experience, and are a little better prepared for what's going to be happening. We have rabbits bred, chickens producing eggs, and long season plants started, or about to start. Lots going on, and a lot to look forward to, including the ever popular baby rabbit photos.