Bunnies!

Technically my last update was “last night” so this isn’t really two updates in one day.. right? But I wanted to update about my rabbits!

I went out to check on baby rabbits today and they’re all doing great. I got my first real look at the rex-cross litter and how they are coat-wise. I have picked them up and handled them a lot but they have been underdeveloped in the coat for a while, and then we got the cold snap and they were hiding under fur every day.
I know a fair amount about coat color genetics, but I had no way of knowing what colors the rex babies were going to come out as… This is because, though mom is otter in coat, and dad is white, a white coat is just a lack of pigmentation. If there’s no pigment, then there’s no way of seeing what the genetic coat patterns are! So they could have gotten spots or stripes or just about anything from their dad pattern-wise.

So far my pairing has expressed three coats. Red Eyed White, Sable and Black. None of them came out with the “otter” coat of their mom. All of them have soft fur, but not the dense fur of an adult rex. I am not sure if baby rex rabbits have that dense plush coat or not, but I suspect they will develop into an extremely soft version of the New Zealand coat; thick medium-length furs. New Zealands have fairly corse fur, so this is a big difference in fur quality.

All around I’m very pleased with this pairing. It gives me exactly what I wanted; rabbits in a few different “natural” colors with extremely soft coats… But not the short fur of the rex. These are the “ideal” fur rabbits to me, and with how fast they have been growing, I suspect they’ll still be amazing meaties.

It seems, also, that I have sold most of these rabbits already again. Including the litter of New Zealand Whites. Greg and I have been discussing adding to our rabbit hutch, or building up cages in the garage. VERY exciting! The litter of whites is growing a little slow… I’m not sure why they are, but I suspect they will still be huge adults. As soon as they are on solid foods they should grow very fast.

Today all the bunnies snacked on lots of dandelion flower stems. The stems of the flowers are full of sugars and nutrients to feed the flowers and give a great calorie boost to the moms. Plus it gives me a reason to “weed” my lawn, and prevent too many of those flowers from going to seed!

Litter of New Zealand Whites

My sister’s chinese crested getting nose-to-nose with a baby bunny

Two of the rex babies, one sable and one black for comparison

One of the huge sable babies sticking it’s head out of the emergency nest box I put in, covered in mom’s fur.

All the Cray that isn’t Fish

It’s said that in Cleveland that if you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes. It’s also asked “What do you call a day in Cleveland where it’s 70 degrees and sunny after days of rain?” The answer is, of course, “Monday”! After weeks of nice weather, it suddenly began to pour over the weekend. And on friday it decided to hail. And saturday, too.

A photo of some of the hail we had over the weekend, taken from a local news site.

This after weeks of dry as a bone tropical weather. Of course it was still toasty as the hail came screaming down and melting immediately upon gaining contact with the wet ground… My sister and I left to visit my mother and get lunch on the way and pulled into a fast-food joint as it started hailing hardcore. The banging of the hail on the car roof was so loud I had to shout to be heard in the front seat. Naturally that first thing I asked as we pulled in? “So do we try to shout over the hail through the drive-through speaker… Or run inside as fast as we can!?” At the top of my lungs. I got a dirty look for that one. Ah, hail humor.

We decided to wait it out. It calmed down just long enough for us to get our food. It stopped by the time we reached our destination. Somewhere at home my strawberries had become a sadder sight, with holes in the leaves. The next day it did it all over again. And now we’re getting frost warnings every night!

Oh Cleveland weather, you sly dog, you! You’re so crazy!

Credit to Abby Howard @ JSpowerhour.com

Naturally all this cray wasn’t the limit to the cray cray. On friday morning I woke up and immediately cleaned cages so I could sell some rabbits. The one Purina was in had gotten pretty bad with all the not-so-baby bunnies in there for so long. The babies went home to a couple getting back into breeding rabbits after some 20 odd years. The other two ladies were due to go home as well, except one of them has something like a bacterial infection of the tear gland (wat? since when is that a thing?) and needs treatment. We’ve been doing a saline flush and chamomile, but it’s not working well. Unfortunately that means antibiotics. The good news is that it’s an inexpensive relatively safe treatment. All the while Greg was handling a job interview and application process for a very decent office job that could cover all our bills. Crazy morning.
Then I went to visit my mom at the hospital during the hail storm. She got some holes in her belly put back together the day before. It was also the day after her birthday! What a birthday, huh? She was eating had candies and drinking apple juice; impressive considering they did a minor intestinal surgery. She was doing great, already up and walking around with a gusto. She wants to be done and OUT of there! And soon she will be and will be back to normal again… At least for now, and that will be good.

I came home and had to clean up hail damage. I ended up having no time to post my foraging friday. I’ll do a double next week to make up for it!

Then on saturday we woke up and all the oldest baby bunnies broke out again. luckily they’re in the garage so as usual they only give us some frustration, it’s not serious. I really need to find a way to put mesh tops on those cages… And one one of them they chewed through the netting wall around their water bottle! I fixed it with some wire mesh; they can’t chew through that! Then we went out grocery shopping.
Leaving Greg at work immediately after my sister helped me unload the groceries into the house. And by “help” I mean she dropped a 24 pack of cookies on the floor! She picked them up, but left them open on a nearby table. I immediately had hours of stuff to do, and so putting the cookies away didn’t take top priority. Whoops.
While I was out taking care of my sister’s dogs, Nukka the Crazy Husky got into the box of cookies. Completely ignoring the less-irritating oatmeal raisin cookies she snacked down on TEN very BIG cookies some four inches across… Each one filled with something toxic such as chocolate or macadamia nuts. (Please note; raisins and grapes are also toxic to dogs. This was a bad situation all around.) Naturally I didn’t notice until much later that evening when Greg went for a cookie and we wondered where they had all gone. Normally in that situation you’d fill your dog’s tummy with hydrogen peroxide until they puked it all out (this is legit, I swear), but in this case it had been five hours already and I figured they were probably digested. The next day she had all the symptoms of a blocked intestine, or potentially pancreatitis. She puked all over her crate and it smelled like diarrhea, which was something she also had. She was starting to drool and couldn’t keep anything down. Oddly enough she showed none of the symptoms specific to toxicity like shaking legs or lack of appetite.

So Sunday night I spent in the lobby of an emergency vet with my cray cray cookie-thief of a dog. And I stayed there until well into this morning. Greg wasn’t with me because he now has a new job and started today. After a large bill was handed to me they had determined she had a swollen intestine from all the crap she ate and was otherwise fine. No blockage, normal pancreas, no toxicity. This is not the first time this has happened. She got IV fluids, was given no food for 10 hours and then was put on a bland diet with anti-nasuea pills. She’s recovering quickly so far.

And now? We’re being the crazy dog owners that cook food special for their dogs. Boiled chicken and white rice for 2-3 days.
And poor Greg? This whole time he has been trying to get this job that will pay all our bills, and got it. Upon the getting of which he realized his two week notice at Starbucks wasn’t up. Now he has 12 straight days of work ahead of him after all this craziness, one of which is a 12 hour day.

And as of today? I have sold 11 of the 12 in the new litters of rabbits.

Oh life… Y U no be sane?

Best Laid Plans…

“You remember that impossible situation we discussed?”
“Yeah?”
“That’s what happening now!”

Of course, my life can never be normal. Never ever. Why would things be easy or normal?
We bred Evo expecting her to be either an emergency foster mom for Kibbles, or Kibbles would be a good mother for Evo’s kits. We had discussed this pretty thoroughly. This was to be Evo’s last litter; she produced two litters of four each. One was four frozen babies, the other litter died within 24 hours. We expected another litter of four. We had set up a potential new home, had a potential new breeder… Everything was ready to roll. But life is never that easy.

On may 4th I wandered out in the early morning to find five kits in the nest box… Not too bad but nothing like a big change. The next morning there were eight in the nest box. One of the babies was dead and a little bloody; stillborn. But there were still seven live kits, and as of right now they’re all healthy and happy.

Which brings up a connudrum. Greg and I agreed we’d re-discuss keeping her if she produced a big, healthy litter. But we basically dismissed the concept outright; after two nearly identical litters it was impossible that she’d have a real litter, right? We moved forward with considering what to do with her after she was done with the litter, and trying to find a replacement. And now we’re kind of stuck.

Rabbits are in a huge demand, and we have a low genetic pool with only one breeding pair of NZW’s. If Evo produces well enough, we have the potential of selling pairs and trios of half-siblings for breeding to other people who want rabbits. Our replacement is over one year old and has never been bred, she could flop horribly as a mother, while Evo is experienced and doing well (right now). We also wanted to find her a good pet home, because she’s a sweetie, and found one… If we keep her we have to cancel that.

It’s complicated and there’s no “good” solution. I can keep Evo and have good potential for more litters. I have a low potential for good litters from the possible new bunny. Also the home I have picked out may not be there forever.

We’ll probably keep Evo on for one more litter at least. It could just be she produces poorly in cold months. Which would be fine if we keep her for the summer. We’ll figure it out.

Aside from that, I have ninteen baby bunnies in my home right now. Five will be going home this weekend. Two are staying home with me; one to breed and one to eat, and the last one to go to a friend for meat and fur. The rest of the baby bunnies are up for sale.
The rex babies are growing extremely fast. They are the chubbiest bunnies I have seen thus far. They kept crawling out of their nest and throughout the cage, and one even slipped through a crack to escape from the cage itself. I found it four feet away underneath the hutch, perfectly fine. I finally dared to try putting a nest box in and hoped that Kibbles would ignore it. It worked; the baby bunnies have not gotten out of their nest since, and their mom has been ignoring the box. Success!

Maybe someday things will work out the way we expect…. Some day!

Foraging Friday; Plantains!

You’ll notice that this has no relation to bananas at all.

This little plant is probably my favorite foraging plant. Commonly called a plantain, the true name for these plants are “Plantago”. They have no relation at all to bananas but are just as useful!

Originally a european plant, it was brought to america by settlers. Because of it’s wide variety of uses this plant was cultivated, but then went wild becoming a common weed in most lawns growing at the edges of concrete, like sidewalks and roads. The most common kind is the one featured above, the broad-leaf plantain. Most plantains are edible, but since plantains contain around 200 different species, in this case I am just going to be covering the broad leaf plantain (Plantago Major). This is the most common and most useful of all the species and shows up just about everywhere in the world. Remember that if you find a plantain that is not the broad-leaf variety, you should look up it’s individual properties before consumption… However, most are safe to eat.

Leaves as Food

The leaves of this plant are packed with nutrients including high levels of calcium and vitamin A. They also have very high levels of vitamins C and K. Biting into a young tender plantain leaf will bring you back to your literal salad days as they taste a bit like a cross between babyleaf spinach and a mild radish! It’s like having a whole salad in your mouth in one bite. It’s a really nice flavor with a hearty crunch. Because of the high calcium levels this green is especially good for older women and should only be fed in moderation to people or animals that respond poorly to calcium like rabbits. Older leaves are tough and chewy and could be stewed or used in thick dishes that could benefit from some green, like curry or oxtail soup.

Seeds as Food

The seed-stalk of a broad-leaf plantain

Tedious, and hard to gather, the seeds of the plantain can also be eaten. These seeds are packed with fiber! They can be used much like a grain, eaten straight, boiled as a cereal or ground into a flour. I can’t attest to the flavor or cooking properties of this; I have never bothered eating the seeds. Please take special note that in many species the seed husks are a laxative.

Leaves as Medicine

The leaves of the Plantago plant have many uses, but they are actually a strong healing plant grounded in science. I have actually used these leaves on cuts since I was a little girl. Mashed into a poultice, the leaves of this plant are a pain killer, an antimicrobial and antiseptic, and they also speed cell regeneration! (Whaaat!?) This is not some hippie BS factoid either; this has been scientifically tested and proven. Rubbing crushed leaves on a wound that’s been rinsed in water is a great way to clean it out and prevent infection. The leaves can also be boiled into a tea that can be used to soothe bowel irritation and diarrhea. This plant is AMAZING.
Because of it’s intense medical and nutritional properties, if you have a significant health concern like irritable bowel syndrome, cancer or a recent belly surgery, please consult with your doctor before eating or using this plant in any way.

Seeds and Roots as Medicine

The roots of this plant have shown no exceptionally edible properties and I wouldn’t eat them; but the roots of this plant can be used much the same way as the leaves as an antiseptic. The husks on the seeds can be a powerful laxative and are actually used in commercial over the counter products like Metamucil!

Other Uses

The leaves of this plant have long, tough fibers in them and when they get large, they can be harvested and woven into rope. This plant is also known for it’s extrodinary positive effects on soil. This plant thrives in foot traffic and poor conditions and leaves the soil better than when it started. The plant simultaneously breaks up hard-pack soils and the root system helps hold the soil in place as nutrient levels are restored, preventing erosion.

Identifying the Plantain

The most important thing to look for on a plantain is the veins on the leaves. Leaf shape can vary a lot, but in general they have smooth, wide leaves. However, depending on the soil they grow in, how big they are and local pests, while the leaf shape may vary, but the veins never will. They will branch out from the stem of the leaf smoothly and curve around before coming close together at the tip edge of the leaf, giving the leaves their wide, ovular shape.

Thick, fibrous veins through plantains give the leaves a distinctive look.

The plantain grows low to the ground, at or below the level of cut grass. It’s flat leaves branch out from a single, low point and spread out to cover as much ground-space as possible. It’s flower and seed stalks are very distinctive, being tall and very thin cones coming from the main root of the plant, often curving slightly as they rise up. This is one of the easiest to identify wild plants and is probably one of the most diverse in it’s uses!

Flat, and below the grass-line, cut by lawnmowers and nibbled by bugs, this is what most “weed” plantains end up looking like.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask. As always, practice safe foraging techniques; wear gloves, be aware of any poisonous animals, bugs or plants that are near by, and always make a careful ID based off of photographs before eating. Happy foraging!

Kibbles the Devil Bunny

I am no longer certain that Kibble’s pedigree is correct. We bought her from a breeder that handed us a pedigree upon dropping her off, but there must have been a mistake in the paperwork somewhere down the line because I don’t see “the devil” listed anywhere in her lineage… But it really ought to be.

Look at that glaring eye, plotting your eternal demise.

She’s always been a little bit finicky about being touched, which sucks because she, being a rex, is very soft. And when she is lifted up it sometimes looks like her huge eyes are going to pop out of her head. Sh never liked it when I pet her, or lifted or, although she’s always been curious about her surroundings.

Then she got pregnant and we moved her outside.

Now she’s just batshit crazy. An object worth sniffing? ATTACK IT! A hand reaching into the cage? FULL ASSAULT! Her bowl of food? FLIP IT OVER VIOLENTLY! Her nest boxes? DEMOLISH THEM!

Seriously, every time I go to check on her she’s growling at me, swatting with her paws, stomping her little feet, charging me… She’s just gone nuts. I’m going to work with her to see if I can improve her behavior at all, but it’s REALLY up in the air right now. I don’t know if it’s her being pregnant or her allergies or what that is driving her nuts, but it’s there.

But she DID manage to give me five healthy kits yesterday, four dark furred and one white. I checked on her in the afternoon and found she had pulled a nest (not in a box of course, those were all destroyed on contact) and there were three babies scattered about her cage, alive and clean. I quickly tucked them into the nest and by this morning all was well and there are a total of five curled up together, all fed and active. This is really good because rabbits have been in huge demand lately. After selling off the entirety of this litter by three weeks old, I’ve been contacted by other people looking for kits too… And I have a huge list of people looking for rabbit meat, but if they just keep selling live I am not sure I will even have any! A friend wants to buy some 20lbs or so for an achery event and BBQ he’s holding… I don’t think I’m gonna have the rabbits for that by then if they keep selling this way! We’ll have to see how these rex crosses turn out. I’m hoping they get the big body of their dad and the soft fur of their mother.

Evo is due any day now. She made a nest in a sturdy box but I have no idea what’s going on with her. She managed to get out today… I had the cage unlocked while I got some fresh greens for them and the next thing I knew she was no longer in her cage four feet from the ground, but was instead hiding in the wood chips by the chicken’s pen… I do hope she’s OK and that her kindle goes better than her last two. At this point? I need the rabbits!

Too Many Veggies

So I managed to run into someone who worked as a building manager for an assisted living facility. Every week they get a food truck, packed with veggies. And every week, since they don’t finish them, they throw them away.

What.

Sometimes the building tries to donate the food to churches and the like, but only if someone comes to pick it up. Ultimately, since all these organizations are non-profits nobody wants to fund picking it up or dropping it off so it gets tossed. It’s “cheaper” that way. Also unfortunately this girl I met has no real food processing equipment at all. She takes home what she can and uses it but we’re talking a quarter ton of food ever month, there’s only so much one familly can do to cut through that. Lucky us we managed to meet up. She brought me what must be 100lbs of food and she said that wasn’t even all of it. It’s all a little older, but in there was some 50lbs of potatoes, 20lbs of carrots, 10lbs of onions, and a big box of some 25lbs of apples and pears. (Mostly apples.)

Now, while the apples were starting to go questionable on me and I have a lot of experience doing Things With Apples (especially old ones), I have NO idea what to do with 50lbs of potatoes. I sure as all heck won’t be using them all before they go bad! I go through some mere 15lbs every few months!

Work station for prepping the apples for apple butter

I managed to turn the majority of the apples into Apple Butter, something I got practiced at after doing a Pick Your Own Apples thing with my familly last year and something I used to do as a kid at this amish farm. So now I have four pints of apple butter cooling on my shelf and I am out of jars or I would have made more. I also made an apple pie, for which my sister generously donated a crust and for which I gave her half the pie. I am thinking I may need more jars to use the last 15 apples I have. I gave some peels to the dogs, rabbits and chickens but the chickens didn’t like them much and the rabbits would only eat a few before stopping. Makes me wish I had a small and delicious pig to feed them to…

But what about these root veggies? I am really not sure. I could make a massive curry pot (or five) until I ran out of onions but I’d be left with tons of potatoes still. And that’s the real kicker; 50lbs of potatoes. The rabbits like eating carrots, so they’re not a HUGE problem since I have ANY sort of use for them. Not so much the potatoes. And there’s only so much three chickens can eat, as much as they flip their wigs for potato peels. And these potatoes are HUGE. I chopped two of them into cubes, blanched them, and froze them so I could use them later on like frozen peas… But just the two potatoes filled my gallon ziploc half-way (which is the maximum for allowing them to lay flat nicely). I think I’d have to do about 20 more of those to go through the whole box. Not to mention the chickens barely ate through the potato peels I put out today as it is.

And I was informed I would be getting boxes like this from her occasionally (possibly weekly?) in exchange for some of my own home-brewed things such as trading for eggs, rabbit, furs, or even just processing or preserving them into other things (like the apple butter). Not just root veggies, either, but tons of greens too.

Help! I think I am drowning in vegetables! What do I do with them all!? Any ideas?

Foraging Friday; Prepping for Foraging

I’ve decided to start a weekly series on foraging for wild edibles. I feel like it’ll help me keep up with posting more often, and it’ll share some of the knowledge I’ve picked up over the years. While most of the homesteading and farming things I do are new to me, hunting down and eating wild plants is not. For years I learned these skills from my mother. She owned every reputable book on plants you could find at the time, a collection I hope to own myself some day.

As a kid we would go camping each year and hunt through the forest for things we could eat. We would find mayapples, danelions and cattails to eat before we retired to our camp for s’mores. We would do leaf rubbings and identify wild plants. We would discuss ones that were deadly poisonous and the ones that were only edible if treated properly.

I was also taught how to build shelters if I was lost in the woods, and how to identify animal tracks. It was all a part of survival to her, in case I ever had to take care of myself in an emergency. Today it’s part of being sustainable to me. Many of these plants run wild as weeds across the US. They’re so incredibly prolific they’re impossible to wipe out. When cultivated, many of these plants get HUGE. They’re normally packed with nutrients and some are things you may even have sitting on your shelf right now.

The most important thing to remember about foraging is to make sure you know what you are eating. One mistake and you can find yourself breaking out in boils, vomiting wildly, or worse, dead. Because of this I have never gone mushrooming. I refuse to forage mushrooms on my own because the risk is too great. However there are lots of plants that are easy to identify, and are completely safe to eat right in your own back yard.

Identifying an unknown plant online is very difficult. If it’s a very common weed you have a good chance of finding it easily, but if it’s slightly rarer or generic in form it can be very hard to find the correct plant. For this reason I suggest that everyone have a book of plants. Specifically, ALL plants, not just edible ones. If you’re trying to identify a plant you’ll want something that tells you what it is no matter what. If you can’t find something JUST like it in an “edible plants” book, you may mistake it for something similar and safe when it’s not. Once you idenify a plant you can always look it up by it’s name online to find out if it’s edible, so buy a good all-purpose plants book instead of a wild edibles book to ensure you know what plant it is you have found. Also, do not buy just a “native plants” book or “wild plants” book either if you can avoid it because many plants are non-native (many north american weeds are imports from europe) or a domestic plant gone wild.

You may also want a decent pair of non-cloth gloves, small clippers and a basket to gather your plants in. Some edible plants like nettle are covered in large spines. You don’t want to touch the spines and they can be difficult to cut, so while these items aren’t nessicary they can be useful. You also don’t want to touch a poisonous plant by accident, so if you are somewhere prone to lots of wild plants (like a campground) you may also want long clothes and high boots.

If you are further south you may also want to beware of snakes, spiders, scorpions or other potentialy poisonous critters. There are many poisonous creatures that hide in the same place your plants do.

Lastly, always make sure to thoroughly wash or cook your edibles. They sit outdoors with lots of wild animals that carry parasites and diseases such as giardia, coccidia or tapeworms, and those are three things you just don’t want in your system. So always wash your plants.

Each week from now on I’ll be featuring a new plant that you can find all over that is edible. I will tell you how to harvest it, how to eat it and what it’s properties are nutritionally to the best of my abilities. In the meantime, happy foraging!