Cows, cold, nest building, and thoughts.

Meet a Highland Cow! They're very fluffy and in my opinion good looking cattle originating from Scotland that seem to be very well adapted to the rough terrain and cold winters of our area. This cow is actually from Gordon's Fold farm which is (in theory) walking distance from my house through the woods. The Lady of the House and I went for a wander along a near by road for an artist event that ended at the above cattle farm where we cooed at the cattle for a while.

News of all kinds, and introducing Serena.

Today is a day of news! Good news the first! Twilight has given birth to 5 big, healthy kits. She had 9 total, but 3 were under developed, and one was born dead it seems. Fortunately the rest of them are thriving, and for a single shot breeding rather than one morning and one night the way we usually do, that's not bad at all. 

A very autumnal August as we muddle on through.

The Lady of the House is back, and we're back to having good photos! Lots is going on in our life, which seems to be a refrain right now. But let's start by focusing on the babies. Above is the runt of all of the litters that's still alive, and seems to be inclined to stay that way much to our pleasure and relief. Obviously in the realm of don't count your bunnies before slaughter date, but it looks like we'll have 20 survivors out of the 23 in these last litters.
Halley and Comet's litter has been a fairly significant focus for us in this last round which is why you've seen so many photos of their babies. The runt is from their litter, and the picture of the black and creme pile Left is obviously theirs. It has been a focus because we really want to see if it is practical to have parents in the same hutch. There seem to be definite advantages and disadvantages. Halley and Comet enjoy each other's company is a big obvious benefit to it. A down side though is they reinforce each other's fears and nervousness more than they reinforce their strengths. With the rather unique choice they made to lay in the same nest the up side is all of the babies can cluster together or migrate apart to be warmer or cooler to self regulate temperature a bit. The down side is that the phenomenon of some babies not getting enough milk is exacerbated because there are more babies in one place, and both moms seem to sometimes feed the same babies. Things I think could help for the future of two moms in a hutch. 1: Have three or four smaller nesting areas rather than two larger nesting areas. The hutch Halley and Comet are in suffer from being designed specifically as a growing out hutch, and it's really showing more than I expected. 2: A second level is a must for anything I hope to have as a two doe breeding hutch. Sometimes everyone needs a bit of alone time. Unfortunately (and this again, seems to be a refrain) I haven't had as much time to work on building new hutches as I'd like to have. It's the curse of working 60 + hours a week. It has been exacerbated by troubles that I'll talk about near the end of the post.
Before I move on from kits I want to address Monster Kit Right. The photo Above of a baby on the scale is about a normal sized kit, note the size in relation to the scale. Compare to Monster Kit barely fitting on the scale at just about the same age. We are kind of amazed at monster kit, and if it turns out to be female we may just have an American White, because that's going to be one big healthy kit it looks like.  618 grams today.



Gardening, intentional and otherwise continues. Let's start with unintentional, specifically the blackberry bushes that crowd the side of the deck and are absolutely Covered with berries that are still ripening at almost a cup a day! At this point we have a full 1 gallon bag of blackberries and about the same quantity of yard strawberries which is great. We need to make the time to make a pie, or a few. A few notes for those of you who are genuinely city folks and have never picked berries before, specifically blackberries. Their thorns don't point out so much as in, make sure you have a clear exit from the bush before you climb in to get at the big branch of ripe berries that's JUST out of reach. Also, while the idea of using gloves to pick berries to avoid the thorns sounds like a good idea, it probably isn't unless you like mashed berries all over your gloves.
Next stop, and virtually unmentioned for a while is the pepper plants. They're looking great, particularly the lemon peppers and the cayenne peppers. The challenge as first timers is, when to remove them. Something the Lady of the House cautioned me about is apparently you Must cut the peppers from the plants because pulling them off can kill the plant prematurely. Good to know when you want ever more peppers as I do! Our big concern with the peppers is keeping an eye on the weather, with temperatures dropping into the low 50s at night consistently in mid August we are obviously concerned because peppers are hot weather plants. The one you see in the picture Above is potted so if it gets particularly cold we will be bringing it in to attempt saving it and keeping it going all winter, just because.
Given it is our first year of gardening we were expecting a fair number of disappointments, and Left is the first confirmed disappointment other than the under producing Squash, the dead Sunflowers, ok so it isn't the first. If you can't tell what it is that's a single very small potato. It's all that came out of one of the 4 potato buckets. The other three plants are kind of still alive so we're hoping for better out of them, but, from the positive perspective, it's our first home grown potato! We've had a fair number of firsts this year, and for some reason I was really looking forward to having a bunch of home grown potatoes which is why I'm particularly disappointed about the potato plants just being mauled by bugs. We'll see what the other 3 buckets produce.
I mentioned complications in our life, and I am not sure if I've mentioned the big one. Our car died a bit over a month ago at this point, and it's made life complex. We have been VERY blessed by friends with two different friends loaning us vehicles so far, and a family member loaning us a car starting next week. The car you see Right is a rental as we try to figure out what we want, need, and can afford in a vehicle. It's led to the Lady of the House and I working on figuring out what it is we need in a vehicle based on our realities.

1: We live 25ish miles from work, and drive 500+ miles a week. We need to be driving something with a reasonable gas mileage which eliminates a lot of the things that would be particularly good for some of our later requirements.
2: Space is a consideration given that not only do we commute a lot, but we also need to be able to haul around lumber, hay, food, etc as well as ideally be able to fit a friend or two into the back seat. So based on that we've been thinking hatch back because a pickup truck is ruled out by the gas mileage thing.
3: Reliable, but I'm fairly sure everyone wants this in a car. What that means for us is also not too expensive to repair which usually means Honda, Toyota, or the like based on our area which unfortunately rules out one of our first choices, the Subaru hatch back line.
4: Inexpensive, we are not doing well financially, especially with adding in car costs we're having to watch carefully what we can get.

So that's what has been taking a lot of our brain sweat lately, trying to figure out the car situation. For now, the kindness of others has been keeping us on the road, but imposing consistently is something we'd rather not do, so hopefully we'll have our perfect mixed lifestyle vehicle that doesn't cost much to maintain or purchase soon. Hope you all have a great weekend.

The importance of correct and working equipment.

So, today's post is a little scattered and last minute because this morning we were thinking about getting the car to the right place at the right time to get repaired within our budget. So I got to the internet this morning and said, "Shit, no blog post!" and the Lady of the House suggested the topic, so I'm running with it.

She actually suggested the importance of a car, which is a big deal. I just decided to expand it because of how often the correct tool or a working piece of equipment would make our lives much easier. The importance of a car is obvious to all of us living outside of a city like Boston, New York, or Prague. You have to have a car, or you can't go anywhere, can't get to work, can't see people. Effectively you can't live without a car in day to day life. That sort of vital necessity of a car that we are all familiar with is especially important in homesteading. It's come up all the time in our lives since we started on this mad adventure. A splitting maul makes life much more bearable

The reason the tractor photo is up top is simple, our first piece of equipment we really needed to work, and didn't have working was a tractor. With a tractor digging beds would be done by now, I could have started work on a cold storage facility, and we wouldn't have needed to buy the snow blower. But, lacking the snow blower, our first winter we lacked the proper equipment, and shoveled the driveway until our bodies gave out, and we had a sheet ice slide instead for months. There's plenty of other examples going on around the house, even right now. Having the correct shovel, and yes there is a difference. Those of you who keep up with us recognize the broken shovel. We Had to get a new shovel to keep digging garden beds because a flat nosed transfer shovel is not a round nosed digging shovel, not even a little bit. So I guess the point of this post is, make sure you spend the money to get the right tools to do what you are aiming to do, without them your life will be much more difficult! Right now, we're looking at what sorts of tools would make our lives more tenable.
1: A vehicle with more transportation space, probably a pickup truck.
2: A tractor.
3: A wheel barrow because carting around 5 gallon buckets of dirt and rocks isn't the most efficient thing ever.
4: A mattock for digging because, while shovels are great for digging, if you want to break up hard ground you use a mattock if you don't have a back hoe.

Those are really the big tools that we should have to do what we're trying to do. There's also things like rain barrels, fencing and so on that we'll need to do a lot of what we want long term, but those aren't so much tools as supplies. We'll work on the tools we need, but lack of them is definitely in the forefront of our minds right now as we try to get the plants we have in the ground before we run out of time.