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!

Quick hit: Big kits, shy kits, and snowy wood

It's another short post since I'm working too many hours. Some of Sunshine's kits are coming out to explore from time to time, but are very skittish due to lack of handling. Otherwise they're growing well.

Something drew the attention of Twilight and all of her kits when I was out there this morning. Not sure what it was, but they were all focused on it. They're getting big, I think it's about time to butcher them all out when I have a couple hours. Probably next week. Some nice big kits though. Halley and Comet's kits are also getting big, though as usual not quite As big as Twilight's kits. Interesting note though is that the kit we fostered over to Twilight you can see in the top left is the same size as Twilight's kits despite being from Halley and Comet.

 The price of unfinished tasks is upon us as snow has covered the wood piles. It means bringing wood in sooner to dry it in front of the fire rather than being able to just have it out there and get what we need. Ahhh well. Next year there will be a wood shelter. It's been nice coming home from work to a fire warmed house though, it is much nicer than coming home to my mandated 55 - 60. But, we're managing our wood pile well so we should have plenty for the rest of the winter at least. Well, as long as we don't get a mini ice age going here which isn't in the predictions. So, that's all for now. I'll try to have some substance for you next time, maybe talking about fatigue, cold, and pain management, and how it relates to homesteading.

Quick hit: Ice, bunnies, and an eggstacy of eggs

It's cold, icy, and I'm working way too much so this is going to be a very short post without too much to say. The young kits are doing well, and while their mom Sunshine doesn't like me bothering them too much she's gotten used to it. They aren't as friendly as kits as I'd like, but a large part of that can be attributed to the fact that I haven't had time to handle them, and it was too cold to do weight checks. In the future I'm going to really try to push for handling if there aren't weight checks, but that means figuring out a way to keep kits warm and healthy when being handled when it's REALLY cold.

Oddly enough it's been warmer lately than it was earlier in the winter and fall. The difference is and why the work on the new hutch has stalled is the snow, and more importantly ice all over the place. 3" of snow, no problem, a good solid 1" of ice Is however a problem. Combine that with a really insane work schedule lately and I just haven't been able to get anything done. Barring being bad at sleep I think I've spent about 10 hours at home awake this week, and 7 of that is morning wake up, and farm chores.

On the other hand, we do have some really pleasant things happening. In particular Dora, the smallest of our chickens has gone on an egg laying binge. We were just thrilled to have Some eggs before she knocked off for the winter, but she's just gone and laid 6 eggs in the first 7 days of egg laying. This time I cheated and took the photo of the eggs against a white background so you can see how blue they are without me actually enhancing the photo at all! You can also see why I'm not working on the hutch since that's the bottom wire.

Sorry for the short post today, this is going to be my 4th, 14 hour work day in a row. I'll try to have a solid quality post Thursday, but no promises.

All sorts of new!

So many new things I wasn't sure what to start with so I defaulted to baby rabbits, even if it is blurry. Sunshine's litter is all alive and well, and have opened their eyes! I missed my favorite day of them with eyes half open. It's been a busy few days since the last post before Thanksgiving thus all of the new!

Post con exhaustion, and 8 years as a partnership.

Chicken picture just because! They haven't been getting much attention since we put up the tarps which they're finally starting to get used to. We need to put something more solid up to keep the tarp from sagging because that not only bothers the chickens, it makes taking care of them much more difficult since it's too low and we have to duck to get in and out of the run. So far the cold doesn't seem to be bothering the chickens.

Frost vs. freeze, healthy rabbits, and standoffish females.

So, what's the difference between frost and frozen? With frozen kale I can come out at 8:15 and get a last minute blog photo of pretty patterns on the leaves. As you can probably guess, winter has come, though I suppose technically it's still fall for a while longer. My thin southern blood still considers 20s to be winterish.

With the wintery feeling we got some things done that really had to be done promptly at this point. Namely pull in the last of the things we care about from the garden.  Pardon the awful photo Left but that's the stevia plant we put in the ground this spring. We kind of ignored it and wandered off instead of doing the care it really should get. If we had it'd have given us a lot more leaves of delicious sweetness. As it is, it's got a fairly good bunch of leaves it looks like to me. We're bringing it inside and drying it. The Lady of the House is trying drying a couple stalks and oven drying the rest of it since oven drying makes for a sweeter result. Apparently one can also do stevia extract much like vanilla extract. We may try doing that with some of it because it sounds interesting. Sounds like the sort of thing to research before trying though just so we don't waste materials. We also brought in the last of the tomatoes. None of what we brought in was really good to eat, most of it was lumpy and going soft. A bit frozen in places. Fortunately we have things to do with such tomatoes. No, nothing awful, we're just saving seeds from them. With saving seeds from tomatoes you can look up any number of tutorials online how to do it, and it's fairly simple. We just cored out the seeds from the tomatoes and put them in a bit of water to get the goop off. Fermented tomato goop. So as you can see for now we have the goopy seed bits sitting on the window sill with labels so we remember what they are. We saved seeds from the paste tomatoes, the cherry tomatoes I don't know the name of, the sun gold cherry tomatoes, and the green zebra tomatoes. The sun golds will be hit or miss with growing them since they were a hybrid. We're going to try breeding them out so they produce the same thing consistently, but that'll take a while. The last thing we brought in was the limon peppers. Tevis recommended we just pull the plants up and dry them on the plants, so we're trying that. We have 3 bushy limon pepper plants covered in peppers hanging over the stove. I look forward to growing those again, and eating the rest of the peppers on the plants!
So I'd promised some baby photos and discussion of the rabbits on Tuesday so here we go! The babies we have on the ground both teen and real babies are doing quite well. The runt of the teen litter is doing well, though it is still very small compared to the rest. As you can tell the teens are very hard to get photos of, and I'm getting fewer and fewer of them that are worth even bothering showing. They move fast, and are very happy to see us when ever we're near by. A friend that dropped by yesterday commented that they run through water fast, which is very true. It's tough to keep them in fresh water all the time. I'm starting to wonder if a 5 gallon bucket feeding the watering points is the way to go with the teens! As for the smaller one, all of the survivors of the first few days out of the Twilight and Halley litters are doing very well. Not having done weight checks I can't give you precise numbers on how well, but they're getting big. Twilight's litter is more friendly than Halley's but that's starting to just be understood as the norm right now. They're not bad kits, they're just a bit more skittish. We've bred Dawn and Sunshine, but when we try to re breed Twilight we've been having something of an interesting quandary. She has been reacting like she did last year when we first tried to breed her. We're wondering if she has a hard cut off of temperature past which she won't accept breeding. Fortunately she hasn't been violent to Starry Night, just standoffish to him. He approaches, they sniff, she grunts, he backs off. She eats his food and waits to go home. He sits in the corner and stares at her, occasionally coming up to sniff at her again. The other option is he's scared of her because she's half again his size . . .
For now we're not sure, and we don't want a late November litter, as much as the idea of "Thanksgiving Kits" sounds nice, I think trying to deal with very young kits during the holiday season when work is in full swing at the warehouse would be beyond what we could reasonably do. Speaking of kits, Sunshine decided it's time to start nest building. Not sure why she's doing so this early, but . . . there it is. I gave her extra hay so she feels comfortable, and I'll probably empty the nest in a week and give her straw. Who knows what goes through the minds of rabbits when it's nesting time.
That's all for this week. Tomorrow we head off to a convention for the Lady of the House to sell, and next week we'll discuss some of the challenges with that and the homestead.

Now breeding, and the benefits of fallen leaves.

I tried to get a photo of masses of leaves falling, but apparently that doesn't work on a camera phone (unsurprisingly). But it does give the impression of what our woods looks like at the moment. Instead of seeing it as a lot of leaves on the ground that are unsightly (which I never have really minded anyhow), I'm actually happy to see leaf fall, it's extra material for the garden beds I should be building in the next few weeks.

We got started with the first of the breedings, and this is a good time to introduce our new buck. Right the blue buck is "Starry Night" from Michelle Chandler. He's the one we traded Umbra for. Today he bred with Sunshine this morning. We'd been planning to give up on her when she started developing Sore Hocks again, but they went away just as fast so we're giving her ONE more chance. We probably shouldn't, but we do like her conformation otherwise and her temperament for the most part.  We were also going to be breeding Dawn this morning, but she wouldn't lift for Dorado, so we'll try her again tomorrow. We're planning to breed Sunshine to Dorado this evening just because, we'd love to have Creme babies out of her. If he happens to have recovered from his heat sterility by now, great! If not we'll still get babies out of each doe. The only one we won't be doing the split breeding between is Twilight because we Just want blue babies out of her.

On the current babies end, all of the babies are out, about, and moving around. Perfect timing for our intentions to start the breeding round that we're beginning. Fortunately this also means that Twilight has stopped offering to assault my face and or hands every time I come near the babies. One thing I can say is that my lack of doing weight checks every day after the first week or so has affected the temperament of the babies. They're less hand friendly, though their curiosity for the most part gets the better of them quite quickly. I'm just going to have to spend more time working with these babies to make sure they aren't fearful now that they're moving around than I would have had I been handling them every day so far. It's not terrible, it's just something worth making sure of.
Speaking of friendly, the teens are almost aggressively so. They are all doing quite well, and it is a nice way to wake up in the morning with being swarmed by piles of bunnies. They do eat a really staggering amount of food though! As you can see in the background of the photo Left they completely and utterly demolished the box fort we gave them. I suspect they enjoyed it greatly before they finished it off, shredded it, and in large part ejected the remains from the hutch before I even came out this morning and finished cleaning up after their party.
The runt has been doing fairly well, but just hasn't gotten the size of the rest of its siblings and hutch mates. This gives it certain advantages. If you see the foot and butt sticking out over one of the silvered black kits that's the runt. It's so small it can just dive over the heads of the others, and they don't get out of the way, it just hangs out on top of everyone else and stuffs it's face. What we're likely to do with that one is just give it a stay of execution and let it grow out a bit more so we don't have one tiny rabbit among the large ones in the freezer. We're around 11 days from butchering out this round of teenagers. What I'm probably going to do is handle them in two batches. Noticeably larger kits in the first round, then everyone else.

Last, and unfortunately, Sergeant and Lottie still aren't home, and we're starting to look into buying replacement hens to make sure there's enough of them to keep warm in the coop this winter.

Those delicate days

It's that delicate time where some babies are growing and some are struggling. As you can see above one of the average sized babies of Dawn with Comet's struggling 44 gram baby.

Bunnyday: Introducing Sunshine, babies, and a new hutch.

Today I'm beginning with Sunshine since I promised we'd meet her, but there's a lot going on rabbit wise. So let's get on with it so we can get to everything! Above and Below the Cut are Sunshine. She is Dawn's sister that we got from Michelle Chandler since she is downsizing her herd.
Sunshine is an experienced mother who we hope will have a slightly more even temperament than Dawn who, while she's a great mother tends to pass on her nervousness. Sunshine seems to really enjoy the cooling stone that we have in her hutch, and has been spending most of her time there after the traditional rabbit exploring the new space period. One thing we quickly noticed about Sunshine is how differently her face is shaped.


Right is Dawn, due to the slight angle differences it may be difficult to tell, but her face is wider than her sisters. A solid broad head, and a thick front of the head. I don't know what the standard for showing Cremes says, but the Lady of the House and I agree that the broader head is probably a better thing for health in the long run.

Conformation wise Dawn and Sunshine are very similar other than the head. As you can see from the photo of Sunshine Top and Dawn Right, they are both very blocky in how they're built. Dawn is a bit broader abeam due to being just about to give birth, possibly as I'm writing this. As you can tell though it really is mostly the head that is different between the sisters.

Then there's Dorado.

Sadly for his studly pride, Dorado looks terrible right now. He is blowing his coat all over the place, and thus looks patchy as can be, he also wouldn't pose for a conformation shot for me. However, we can show off his meaty block head and Dorado Special (TM) flop ears that sometimes pass on to his offspring. For all of his strangely shaped head, he is a solidly built well conformed rabbit otherwise. He also has a huge benefit neither Dawn nor Sunshine have, and that's temperament. Dorado love people, being petted, and more being petted. He is our ambassador rabbit when people come by and want to pet one of the rabbits. If we have babies they're obviously happy to interact, but of the adults Dorado is the happiest to be around people and turns into a bunny shaped puddle when you pet him, only to hop up, upset when you stop.

But, as I said, conformation discussion is actually the least of what's going on right now.

First of all, and I don't have photos for this due to concerns for my safety, Twilight has given birth as of this morning. I only found 3 kits, all healthy. We don't know if that's because there's only three or if I caught her mid birth which is unlikely. If it's just three we'll live with it, and just hope she isn't retaining dead kits. That is a slight concern for us because she's been taking flying leaps up and down from the second level in apparent joy, and we're just hoping she didn't hurt anything doing so. Those of you who have been following along are probably going, "But wait, her babies were in with her last Thursday!" And you're correct! I sort of slipped up some on timing which led to a bit of a scramble to get the new growing out hutch Below done.

I'm actually fairly proud of this monstrosity in no small part because I got it together purely with work on Saturday and going in 2 hours late to work on Monday. Thanks to this I'm a bit sore, and I got all of the babies into their new hutch Monday morning before Twilight decided she needed to dismember them.

This new hutch is an example of learning from experience every time, this time it's 7 feet long to allow a bit of overhang on each side to keep the food covered and prevent as much moisture from getting in. As you can see from the photo Right I incorporated a second level to allow the rabbits more room to move around and have a good time. The back wall is made of 2x4s, not so much because they're ideal or what I wanted to do, but because I didn't have the time to pull apart the 3 pallets it would have taken to get the wood for that. The second level is made of pallet bits, but not gotten by carefully pulling the pallets apart, I took a circular saw and cut the planks out at each support member since I didn't need long boards. The funny part is, even with the mad rush due to being an idiot and having to get everything done Now Now Now, this is still my best hutch. There are ways it would have been better if I'd had an extra 3 hours to pull pallets apart, but even with the hurry I did things as correctly as I can when doing it on my own. The babies seem fairly happy in it, but I'm already seeing ways to improve, and in the future hopefully I'll have two hutches for this many babies, so expect to see another hutch springing up in the next six weeks before the round of babies currently being born needs to be put into grow out hutches.