Beans, cucumbers, and moving on with rabbits.

As promised yesterday in the late post, we got a photo of some of the bounty from the garden before the Lady of the House processed it with some help from a friend yesterday for canning, and canned 4 jars of the beans using our pressure cooker.  The bowl and what you see scattered there is a first picking from our three bush bean plants, so we're going to be inundated with beans if we don't keep up with it between those and our pole beans. Not a bad problem to have.

I had noted a few days ago that I was a little concerned about the cucumber plants. As you can see in the first photo for the day though, we do have cucumbers to eat. Despite the hail tearing up the plant fairly badly, and it looking rough there are a lot of flowers on it, and we're likely to be swimming in cucumbers in the next few weeks. There's nothing wrong with that, especially given that we discovered the night before last that the Critter LOVES cucumber. When I say he loves cucumber, I mean he was grabbing chunks of cucumber, and trying to stuff them into his mouth beyond the point he was so stuffed that he was going to throw up if we let him keep eating! As new favorite foods go for a 9 month old child, that's not a bad one!

On the turkey side of things, getting them tame to our presence is going slowly, and I've for the most part given up on trying to get them in every night. If I have an opportunity to get them in before a bad night I'll take it, but they've found themselves a roosting tree just South of the driveway in the woods. It's a big old pine tree that was probably a pasture tree when the area was cattle land many years ago before the land was allowed to go back to being woods. They're still roosting with the black chick, who can still fly just fine at this point in her life. She'll stop being able to fly well not too long from now when she starts getting egg heavy, at which point it'll be easier to contain her and get her to roost in the coop. By that point need to make sure I have a better enclosed area for them to roam in, that's big enough they don't feel the need to escape over the fence, since there's no way I can afford to cover an area large enough I'd be comfortable confining them to it.

On the rabbit side of things, I due to time haven't been able to do all of the killing, but I did the first couple, and cooked them up last night. As always it's not a chore I'm really ok with doing, but it's no worse than it has ever been. As usual I don't really want to eat meat the day of or the day after, but I'm not a horrible mess. Just the same general dark mood after butchering. As I get this task done I am also seeing about getting does bred. Today they said no, but that's ok, I can try again tomorrow, and the next day. Rabbits are on a 3 day breeding cycle, so in general barring them being uncomfortable otherwise, or later in the year when the shortening days become a problem I should only have to consistently try for no more than 3 to 5 days. I just need to get back into the swing of things now that I'm not afraid of doing butchering anymore. At least no more so than I was before the birth of Critter.