Setting priorities.

Apologies for the missing post yesterday, I just flat out forgot to get things ready for the post yesterday! Either way, here we are today. We've got a lot that's going to be coming up so I'm going to talk about how I handle prioritization. This is going to be especially important given that a lot of decisions are going to have to be made in a short period of time coming up without enough resources to get everything done. That sort of environment leads to decision fatigue, thus, prioritization.

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.

Checking in on the rabbits after much needed rain.

Having finally had some rain, things have cooled down a little much to the relief of the rabbits, next week also looks like it will be very nice weather, so it's probably time to do the next breeding of the season. It also happens to coincide with the kits being at a good age to be separated from their mothers soon. As you can see, Dawn has taken over a lot of the care of her daughters kits, though they actually seem to be sharing quite well. I'm sure dawn will be happy with her own kits with this next round of breedings.

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.

It's hard to imagine that in 3 months the world will be so different

In 3 months there will be growing plants, growing edible plants in this front slope garden. It'll probably be Kale and Radishes, but still. With the greater than dog depth snow (dog for scale) it's good to remind ourselves of that from time to time given the seemingly interminable winter.

It's an interesting life

Life has been interesting lately, and I have a picture of some of it. Today is going to be picture light because there's been too much going on to properly get pictures, and take care of work, and everything else. So. First and foremost, it's been cold, windy, and wet. The windy has had some interesting consequences including making the fire more difficult to light, and trees wandering around. Not like, Ents wandering, falling over mostly. Fortunately for our blue boy here, his hutch was sturdy enough to take a fairly substantial branch falling on it.

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.