Moving rabbits and hutches.

I hope everyone had a good 4th of July. If you're in the USA I hope you enjoyed your Independence Day however you chose to celebrate it, and that your livestock, and the humans in your life weren't disturbed by the fireworks. For the most part we weathered the fireworks just fine, but last night it seems that Boris didn't make it back into the coop, and I wasn't able to find him this morning. Last night was a bad night to be out between the thunder storm, and the fireworks.

Otherwise this was a very good and productive weekend, though we also spent time getting to be sociable and relax which is important in the midst of stressful weeks.

Experiments with water, and dances with porcupines.

Well, I had a plan for the post I was going to do for today so I may as well go with it for at least part of the post. I was going to talk about the brilliant idea I had for the seedlings. For the Lady of the House's birthday/Christmas present I got her a 55 gallon fish tank. One of the things that fish tanks need is water changes, even with a vibrant live plant community in the tank. The reason that fish tanks need water changes of course is that waste builds up in the water. Nitrates and other similar wastes that kill fish happen to be really good for plants. Right now using fish water to nourish plants is actually something of a fad that may end up being a good long term plan called Aquaponics. Given that we don't have the money, or space to do a big set up, using a couple glasses of water per day out of the fish tank to water the plants can't hurt. Well, it could, but I suspect it will be nothing but good for the plants so we'll see. We are doing this in the least scientific way possible, that is, without a control group. Either way, I expect it to work well.

An hour here and there.

I figured I'd start with Boris and his hens. He dragged himself all the way over to the garden and back to the ramp a couple times yesterday. He's still badly injured, but it doesn't look like he's going to die of his injuries. Even if this is how he lives the rest of his life, he's earned sticking around and us giving him care for the rest of that time instead of us butchering him for meat as we usually would for a non productive animal on our property.

Boris's stand.

This has been an eventful weekend, and at least some of what got done is what we were aiming to get done. One of our two seedling trays has been started, and I'm really happy about that. The reason I haven't gotten the second one started yet is because I don't have enough things that need started yet! I mean, I could start amaranth inside, and probably will start some in the second tray, but I realized we are basically out of tomato seeds after I failed to properly save tomato seeds last year. Yay for toddler sleep induced haze! 

That said, there are other things we got work done on, and things that happened that were a huge surprise.

Happy Spring! Time for cleaning and snow.

Happy Spring! As you probably know there's been some significant snow fall up here. It was quite a transition for us since it was warm and rainy on Saturday followed suddenly by snow on both Sunday and a Monday.

Mother Nature reminds us it is winter for some time still.

So one of the problems with talking about how mild the winter has been in late January is, there's a lot of winter yet. She heard us, and has delivered the missing winter. We'll see how long it stays, but She seems to be aimed to drop enough snow for us to remember right quick. On the up side, the Critter still loves every moment of snow.

A big change for turkeys.

Baba Yaga the black chicken who lived in the woods with the turkeys has finally decided it's time to go in with the chickens at night. That night the air was full of the calls of the turkeys trying to get her to re-appear. The turkeys stood on the roof of the chicken coop or the bar of the top of the run as long as they could before going to sleep. I didn't get video of most of their calls, but at the end of the video you can hear them quietly making their contact calls. You can watch the video below the cut.

Chickens out in the run

The orange caution netting is up over the top of the run, and the chickens are out of their coop. Not only are they very happy about it, the Critter is thrilled. Poultry watching seems to be one of his favorite pastimes. Being parents of a very active, very loud child, having something like poultry watching that's a guaranteed hit (temporarily) is a huge boon.

Welcome home Boris

Today we have a new rooster!  He will not be Mr. Bond Mk. III, he already has a name. In this case he is Boris, which oddly enough fits into James Bond just fine. So welcome Boris to the Hillside Homestead. As I mentioned a few days ago he is a Russian Orloff. While you can't see him perfectly since he's still a bit nervous and hiding behind the girls. That said you can see some of the things that make him ideal for our climate. For one thing, he's a big rooster which is good for many reasons. For a second he's well feathered, and has a small comb. Both the feathers, and the comb contribute to him surviving the winter healthy and happy.

Planning for future poultry.

The challenge with living so far from where I work right now is, as the shorter days set in, I'm having problems getting photos for the blog! It's especially true when I've been working some extra hours between my primary job, and doing some overnight shifts for a second job. It's been a bit inconvenient honestly, but one of the challenges with something like small farming/homesteading like we are is, you have to make enough to pay for the "normal" life expenses like food, and home costs. Right now, the money side of things is a bit of a focus since I have some opportunities.

Harsh hail, and new evening routine.

After some rough weather which I'm going to focus on for most of the post, the weather today is gorgeous. Before we get to the damage from the weather, I'm taking a moment to talk about something that we learned quickly about the turkeys, but finally have a photo of. They fly with ease. They're BIG birds, but I let them out, and within seconds they'd hopped out, and with what almost looked like a jump, one was on the just over 6' roof of their coop. Powerful creatures when they choose to me. I have gotten down an evening routine where I put the turkeys into their coop, and separate out the chickens to go back to theirs. It's a remarkably simple thing. I feed them in the evening instead of the morning, so they follow me. Why herd, when you can draw, why fight, when you can get cooperation? It's working so far. The other chicken update is, one of the chickens has started crowing. I hope it's the rooster we know, because otherwise one of the chicks is a rooster.

Rooster out, rooster in, and good fortune.

Things are moving very quickly right now with the Lady of the House very busy with getting working on her art as she's got a show going this next weekend. With all of that, that doesn't mean things have slowed down around the homestead. I'm going to start with the things that are quick first.

First things first, behind me to my right (the left of the photo) is our sunchokes. We weren't sure when to harvest them, but I think it was probably long before now! they seem to be thriving, and I'm sure next year we'll have plenty of them to work with.

In other news, today I bred Dawn's Daughter with Herbie of all bucks. I was surprised he successfully bred a doe, but we'll see what comes out. I really hope he comes through, and it's a big litter of good looking healthy babies. This is the last chance for him to continue living with us, so here's hoping it's great. I'm going to be trying for a second breeding this evening, and seeing if any other does that refused this morning will go ahead and breed this evening. I'm hoping to get a couple other does bred before we're too busy for the weekend to take care of them. We'll see, as a rabbits mood isn't mine to determine, and I'm not going to force them to breed any more than I do by controlling when does are exposed to bucks. The kits are going to be ready to butcher shortly, so we're going to be back in rabbit meat which is always a good thing after a while without.

To my love, and awaiting new life on the homestead

I'm going to start today with some recognition for my lovely wife, the Lady of the House. Today it's been a year and two days of marriage, almost ten years of being together. Without her support in my life not only would the homesteading blog not exist, the homestead wouldn't exist. A lot of what makes my life good is, or is supported by her presence and encouragement. And obviously, without her we wouldn't have our lovely Critter. Really though without her I never would have started homesteading even with the opportunity. Even without that, she's my favorite person in the world, so here's to as many more years together as we can. Below the cut I'm going to go into the rest of what's going on in our world.

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.

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.

Lots getting done thanks to help, also Chickens!

Sorry about the low quality pictures, but we've been keeping busy and I really didn't want to miss another blog post today. Last wee was a consequence of me not understanding just how exhausting first week of college would be from the perspective of being the phone tech support guy. It's still very busy at work, but I am not quite as fried in the evening which is good for actually getting things done. Speaking of getting things done, as you can see Above you see that we've managed to move the chicken coop and run near the house instead of behind the studio barn. That's thanks to a group of friends coming by and helping out Saturday letting us get a lot done!