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.