Moving ahead, leaving things behind.

Today we start with the unlovely, and move on to the lively. This weekend as I mentioned last week we got in a dumpster to clear out things that have turned from treasured personal possessions to trash. Things ranging from books, to only copies of photos, to very practical things like sleeping bags. All of that has been emptied from the barn, and the barn itself is now very much usable again. It has gone from not so much full as too cluttered to use, to organized, and with sufficient room to easily park the car with room to spare for a second vehicle. The shed is also empty of everything extraneous. Oh an emotional level it's tough throwing out things that in the past may have been precious, but let's be honest, our life has changed. There are better uses for the barn now that we're going the direction we are with our life. Once the fencing material is out of the barn there will be even more room.

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.

Weather for growth, pecking order changes.

First things first, I want to give a shout out to our now 4 Patreon supporters. Thanks to the group of you for your contributions, they have made a difference for us.  A week after returning from the convention, I'm finally feeling fully recovered, and refocused at home. As we were away, the plants got rain and sun, and positively shot up! Many are doing very well, but for today I'm going to focus on the beans, and the potatoes. Other than that I'm going to talk about the turkeys and the chickens a bit.

I hadn't quite understood just how fast beans go Up, or how strong their little tendrils are. Because the cattle panel isn't tall enough for their tastes, I put in twine runners, and drop lines for them to climb up, and within a day they're twining around and going up. It's fascinating to watch. Before I had the twine in place, the beans were growing up beyond their supports by twining around each other, and climbing. The tallest of them was over a foot and a half over the top of the support. I'm happy with how well the beans are growing, and that barring some catastrophe wiping out the plants we should have a good harvest of beans this year. Obviously, as with everything on the homestead, don't count your beans, or anything else before harvest.

Checking in on rabbits and potatoes.

There was some interest in how the rabbits are doing after last post, so I figured, especially since I didn't have anything else planned for today, I'd do a check in on the rabbits. Unfortunately most of the photos just didn't come out, but at least this family photo of Splash, Streak, and their kits came out. They eat together like this every day. When there were more kits in there, I had to position the trough so all of them could sit around it, or they'd try to drag it over so they could do that and spill a lot of pellets. The chickens didn't mind that at all, just to be fair.

The photo of Twilight, her daughter, and Twilight's litter on the other hand came out like a blurred mass of ravening animals. Coincidentally, this is about what it looked like in person too. The thing the photo is missing is grunting, a sound somewhat like a gravel crusher in the distance, and the sound of grinding teeth. This group gets plenty of food, but you couldn't convince them of it. If I didn't control their portions this would be a fat group of rabbits really quickly. I've been giving them more greens than pellets lately which is partially to blame for their obsession with the pellets they do get. Right now the adults aren't bred, but that's because of a heat wave. Now that we suddenly have a cold front coming through I'm going to get as many does bred as I can before we get into the August heat. My goal is Splash, Streak, Dawn, Dawn's Daughter, Twilight, and her daughter. I really want to make sure that we get at least someone bred by Herbie. If he still won't breed we have to figure out what to do with him because a buck that doesn't breed, doesn't breathe. We can't just keep throwing food at a non productive rabbit. We may end up taking one of the rabbits in as a house rabbit later on in life, but it wouldn't be him, it would be Dorado who's super friendly. Either way, we'll see what happens with the next round of breedings. The low number of breedings this season due to our other focuses and the odd weather means we're going to be trying to breed later into the fall and early winter. That mostly means more feed because during that time there isn't green stuff to cut and feed to cut  down pellet costs. It may actually work out just fine though.

The other thing that's notable right now is the potatoes that the Lady of the House got into buckets and planted a little while back. For a good starting time they just sat there, and suddenly they started going nuts. As you can see, some are doing better than others for no reason we can discern. We need to get a lot of soil and rabbit manure in those buckets to increase our production with the potatoes. Particularly in the one on the right! I don't know what's going on with that bucket, but I know it's going well. Plans for this weekend are a little off from normal. I'm going to be working overtime at my day job on Saturday which takes up a lot of the normal work time for homestead stuff. We'll see what I can get done Sunday with that in mind, and knowing that I really do need to give the Lady of the House a break from the Critter. See y'all Tuesday.

Two litters, and two blanks.

The weekend has passed, and more babies have been born to Halley which you will be able to see below as black blobs. Dawn and Comet on the other hand have not given birth, and we're starting to be fairly certain that at the time they were bred Dorado was heat sterile!

A small crop of fingerling potatoes as fall establishes itself.

Fall is really and fully here. We haven't had a killing frost yet, but my hands get cold in the time it takes to feed and water the rabbits. Fortunately for the litters that will be born soon the projected weather has lows in the high 40s low 50s for the next 10 days instead of the low to mid 30s that we've been seeing the past few days. If we can get 2 weeks of 50ish degree nights I won't be as concerned about infant mortality as I will be when it's below freezing.

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 rain keeps coming, and pests thrive.

Since last post has been remarkably light on sun, so we have been less productive than we'd like to have been. I don't have trellises done for squash, really, nothing much has been done other than picking the 5ish cups of strawberries from our yard on Saturday. Mind you, it is at least a sweet, rewarding sort of thing to have gotten done. It certainly isn't the burst of Saturday activity we usually manage.

Heat, the garden, and bugs.

As we get in to summer, the solstice having passed a week ago, we're starting to see more bugs. Flies, ticks, spiders, and other critters. The pest type ones are definitely part of why we have chickens, though they aren't yet at the age we can let them roam and do bug control out of their run.

Not all livestock and plants are created equal.

As the title says, the world of agriculture is not the world of Animal Farm. Not all are created equal, and that has been showing up all over the place in the last week or so. I'll get to the plants part later, but let's start with the group that has the most more equal individual, the Chickens.

Growing green, and growing up.

All the world is green, and the garden is growing. Life around the homestead is going well with a few challenges ranging from slugs to impending rabbit adulthood.

So many babies! Trying to catch up with the cute quota as well as garden progress.

Cute baby bunny pictures were promised, and here we are today, quick delivery! This won't be just about the babies or even just about the rabbits, but we're going to start off with a good dose of cute with some good news. Our concern about tomato blight wasn't necessary yet. From the opinion of a couple experts in the form of Michelle Chandler and Kathy  Harrison who's blogs you can see on the right it's not blight, just mineral deficiency which is much better.