A proper update

I’ve been stuck indoors for the past few days with a second degree sunburn plaguing my shoulders. It started as just a normal sunburn. We went to observe some potential lands for the ecovillage, and the cloudy day when it was supposed to rain turned out to be sunny. So my pale skin turned into red skin. Then, the day after that I helped my sister with some minor home repairs and property cleanup. That day I wore sunblock… To no avail. The next day I woke up with shoulders covered in blisters so hot and angry that I could not dress. The pain is still there as the skin started peeling off before the skin underneath was ready, and now it’s like my whole shoulders are covered in a thin scab from being rug burned. It hurts.

This really set me off as we had a village meeting that evening. It really highlighted my frustration with a certain point of sexism in our society, the free the nipple movement. It’s not that I’m immodest and wanna shake my titties in front of guys, it’s a matter of comfort. If it’s extremely hot out or I have something like a second degree burn across my shoulders I shouldn’t have to strap something across my boobs (and sub sequentially, my shoulders lest it fall down) just to make a bunch of guys feel better about their lack of self control. Heat is hot. Burns hurt. These are practical, physical realities for men and women. But women are required to toss some fabric on under these conditions anyhow, and that bugs me in a big way. And while the group I was part of probably wouldn’t have cared much if I went topless, I felt uncomfortable about it anyhow. I ended up just tying some fabric around my chest in a band so it didn’t touch my shoulders… But the whole thing felt dumb.
(Fun fact, men weren’t allowed to show their nips either until the 1930’s. Prior to that, men were required to wear swimsuits that covered their chest for modesty reasons. In fact, in the 1910’s men were required to wear swimsuits that didn’t cling too tightly and may have even been required to wear skirts over their boxers so they weren’t so indecent!)

Because of the burn, I was forbidden the outdoors until I could wear a shirt without flinching again, which was about 3 days. When I came out, I found my garden beds were starting to grow with a gusto…. And so were the weeds. The birds had gotten big seemingly overnight and so had the rabbits. Turns out that being absent from your farm for half a week has big impacts!

So I finally got to go weed my garden and take some photos (my camera is still broken so I borrowed a smart phone) this week. There are some exciting updates on the farmstead itself!

Remember the sad, sad tomatoes?

Surprisingly, they all made it! Some of them are still a little on the smaller side, and some are still recovering. But there’s a huge patch of tomatoes getting bigger by the day growing in my back yard! I have started pinching suckers and blossoms from them. I’m looking to get a crop that I can harvest for canning instead of having them to eat fresh, so I’d like the plants to get extra big before they start fruiting. (I did leave a few blossoms on one plant so we could have a few to eat.)

I have some onions that got planted very late, but are starting to grow energetically. The patch looks bare from about 10′ away, but if you get close you can see literally dozens of onion sprouts peeking through! I’ve had to remind my helpers that these are onions, not weeds.

Somehow the corn made it. But with only two stalks, I’m not sure that they’ll actually pollinate and produce. They were pretty weedy. This whole bed has since been weeded.

The beans and peas are on the northmost wall of my garden bed, but because my lawn isn’t on a true North South line, they are shaded for a few hours in the morning. They’re still growing robustly despite that and are very thick. They’re starting to shade out weeds growing near by.

And speaking of shading out weeds…. The kale! The kale is growing so thickly and is producing some strong, healthy leaves! We’ve started to eat the occasional leaf on a sandwich. The weeds are struggling to grow under these crowns!

We have a few other plants not shown. The watermelons are starting to recover and spring back with lots of new growth and the strawberries are flowering again. The zucchini is flowering as well, which means delicious vegetables are right around the corner! We’ve had some very serious issues with blossom end rot in previous years… This year we planted the zucchini with a handful of crushed egg shells in the hole. Hopefully we won’t see those problems again this year. And the more wild plants like the shiso leaf, the mint, the lemon balm, the plantago and the dandelions are doing well… But they are struggling against the other, less beneficial weeds in the lawn like the cats foot. I hate that stuff.

We also have a few new faces on the farm!

Two leghorns and two australorps came to us from another farm recently. It’s been about a month and they have finished their quarantine period.  We waved goodbye to the old leghorn (who wasn’t laying), our newest chick and our chick from last year to make room for these new birds. They’re all pullets still, under 24 weeks, but the leghorns are already laying strong and their eggs are starting to normalize in size. Soon they will be in the pen with all the other birds.

We also have seven little chicks from some eggs we stuck under our broody. We set a dozen eggs, but like every hatch, there were some problem chicks that didn’t make it. We may even loose one of the ones we have now. It appears to have some unabsorbed yolk, or a small hernia. We brought it indoors to try to recover. Only time will tell. But six chicks is a nice number to have. And our broody hen, a blue Ameraucana, could not be prouder!

We had our NPIP certificate renewed last month. NPIP is the National Poultry Improvement Plan. If you read my post about vaccines, you’d know that flock health is a pretty important topic to me. NPIP is a simple test provided at a low cost to check for avian influenza and pullorum typhoid. These are both very serious conditions that threaten flocks nation wide. NPIP certification is easy… A tester comes out to test your flock. You get the pullorum result immediately with a simple blood prick test, and a throat swab goes to a lab to check for bird flu. The tester does all the work, you just hand him your chickens. In a flock of a dozen birds they may test 4 or 5 birds. Then you get a certificate.

If a test comes back positive your flock may get destroyed or permanently quarantined to keep these serious diseases from spreading.

Aside from having an official lab test and government agency reassuring buyers that you have a healthy flock (and are willing to risk the entire flock on that fact), NPIP certification is required to ship birds or hatching eggs to most states. The regulations vary a little, but if you don’t have NPIP it’s illegal to take your bird across state lines or to most poultry shows.

Our tests came back clean which means we’ll be able to offer hatching eggs for sale again! Hooray!

So, a lot of exciting and positive things are happening on the homestead this week, despite my arms screaming in pain whenever I lift them above chest level.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go strap some fabric that will assuredly catch on the dry, painful, cracking skin all across these burns to appease the masses while I travel to get some chick feed.

Rabbit Raising Myths

I have had a really hard time in the last few years with rabbit raising myths. Having cared for rabbits for more than a decade and been homesteading with them for nearly three years (with previous breeding experience before that) I like to think I have enough experience-based evidence to debunk most of the false claims people give about raising rabbits. There are so many out there that people repeat as if they were bible passages without having spoken to real breeders who try it and it just drives me batty! So here are some rabbit myths that tend to just be nonsense.

Rabbits Will Have Heart Attacks From Loud Noises

Nukka, a vicious killer, sitting peacefully right next to a totally relaxed rabbit minutes after barking at her.

I once heard a lady say that rabbits will keel over at just about anything. Why? She took in a rescue rabbit that had been so sheltered that it’s whole life it only ever knew one human person and no other living thing. She brought it home and her large breed dog barked at it. The rabbit immediately had a heart attack and died.
This goes to show that these things CAN happen. However, they are EXTREMELY rare. Every day my dogs are let out through my garage, they charge right past the rabbit cages at top speed, barking loudly. Once in a blue moon my husky tries to chase them through the wire for a few minutes until I can catch her and scold her. No heart attacks. I use my circular saw and drill within ten feet of them and they hardly budge. They even only pull their ears back if I am using a staple gun on a cage if they happen to be inside that cage. I know a lady who plays their local rock and roll radio station quietly in her rabbit barn. My rabbits have kept on being totally normal through seven different dogs roughhousing within 3 feet of them, cats trying to steal their kits, hawks and raccoons killing my chickens, construction work, the neighbor’s dogs, screaming children… They even made it through *gasp* fireworks near by on 4th of July and new years! Needless to say these things do not phase my rabbits and they aren’t about to die of fright just because there’s some thunder in the air… And wild rabbits have to survive frequent close calls with predators.
Rabbits ARE sensitive to new things and stress easily. I have even seen some of my rabbits have popped blood vessels from having an extreme fright. But it was REALLY extreme (running from the killer husky when she slipped out of her cage) and even then she lived and was fine and proceeded to have a healthy litter two weeks later. They are certainly not about to keel over because someone set off a set of firecrackers in their driveway next door.

Grains and Veggies will kill your rabbits

Baby rabbits, 2.5 weeks old, eating pellets with cracked corn and rolled oats.

Some people claim that the slightest shift in diet will kill off all your rabbits.
Personally, I have never lost a single kit or adult rabbit to a digestive issue. Ever. In the winter I feed cracked corn as 1/5th-1/6th of their diet. I know a lot of people who do the same. In the spring, summer and fall they get everything from bell peppers, kale, dandelions, carrots (both wild and domestic), fresh grass, deadnettle, sow thistle, basil, mint, lemon balm, collards, turnip tops, beet greens, plantago, chard… The list goes on and on! Wild rabbits will happily devour most of these things out of your garden as well! And yet wild rabbits are not exactly on the endangered list from this magical “restricted” diet they are supposed to get… In fact they are one of the most invasive species in the world and will absolutely devastate crops if they are allowed to get out of hand. The key to a rabbit’s diet is two things; fiber and diversity. Many plants that are supposedly “rabbit toxic” are fine in small quantities because they’re only “kind of” toxic such as oak seedlings and broccoli. They can both cause their own type of digestive issues if eaten in large quantities. But nobody ever killed their rabbit by offering them a tiny snack of either. The trick is to not feed anything in a large quantity very suddenly. As the plants start appearing again I start feeding out a few of the reviving leaves from the wild plants I know. As the garden grows they get some small snacks from the garden as the wild plants come in full-force and become a major part of their diet. As the garden then contributes majorly to their diet as well I start allowing them out in “tractor” pens to eat whatever plants they want and feed the occasional full meal of vegetation. I know there are no truly “deadly” plants in my lawn such a poison hemlock so I don’t leave them out all day (so they don’t have only stuff that’s bad for them left to eat out of boredom) and I don’t worry about it.
The other secret is maintaining a healthy digestive system. There’s so many suggestions on this from probiotics and ACV to feeding Grandma’s Concoctions of garlic and cayenne pepper… But the first and best way to a healthy digestive is lots and lots of grass hays. Tons of low-fat, mid-protein and high fiber (especially whole long-strand fiber) feed will keep them healthy as bulls (or bucks in this case!).

Handling New Born Kits or Strange Smells Will Make Mom Eat The Litter

One of our former doe Lucy’s day old kits in my bare hands. This kit is grown and in a new home, distinctly not eaten by her mom.

This is quoted to me so often it’s nuts. Most commonly it’s quoted in reference to not handling kits until they are 2+ weeks old and not to let dogs, cats etc. around moms with litters. Poppycock I say. Once again, my dogs run past barking every day, there are hawks that attack my chickens, on butcher days my lawn smells like blood, sometimes cats and coons and other scary critters come into my lawn… My rabbits just keep on having babies and not eating them. I have had one mom actually eat a litter (Tasty) and she was promptly culled from the herd. She was a bad production doe anyhow.
Sometimes first time moms will appear to eat their kits. This is an unusual phenomena that’s known as “over cleaning”. Does clean the blood off of their kits when they are born. If they are too rough it’s quite easy for those big teeth to cut open fragile skin. This then bleeds, which the confused does begin to try to clean “off” the kit, but are really cleaning flesh and blood “out” of an open wound. The result? Half-mauled kits in the nest, clean on one end, missing on the other. Sometimes it’s all the kits, sometimes they only nibble a “little” (a foot here, or an ear there), most of the time it’s only 1-2 kits that get badly beat up. But this is a very different behavior than just eating the babies because they are threatened and usually goes away after the first litter and the outside environment (predators, loud sounds, handling the kits) has pretty much no influence on this. It either happens or not and the doe either becomes a good mom or not as all does do (or don’t), irrelevant of this happening on the first litter. First litters are often flops.
I and almost every breeder I know also handle kits within 24 hrs of birth without incident. This lets us see if the mom HAS mauled a kit by accident, if they are getting fed, how many there are, any still borns, and birthing matter left in the nest, etc. While some does have attacked ME for doing this, the does are not like “Oh! You have my kit! Better go EAT IT OUT OF YOUR HAND!”. Once I leave the cage, the does normally just check the nest, sees that the babies are fine and life goes back to normal. A doe that eats her kits over disturbances that should be normal is an abnormal rabbit with an unhealthy trait and should simply be removed from the breeding program. They would never reproduce successfully in the wild.

Feed Your Birthing Does Bacon

What? No! Why this awful rumor even exists is sometimes beyond my comprehension, but here it goes. Some people claim that the reason rabbits occasionally eat kits is because they lack something they need in their diet immediately after birth, mostly proteins, fats, iron and calcium. Because of this myth about why rabbits eat kits, some people take a chunk or two of bacon and put them in the rabbit’s cage to kind of “give the rabbit what she needs” without killing her kits.
For starters, there’s no evidence that rabbits eat their kits due to nutritional deficiencies. Accidents or stress, yes, nutritional deficiencies, no. So the reasoning here is patently false. But far worse is the idea of feeding your rabbit bacon to fix it in the first place.
Some rabbits will actually EAT the bacon. But it’s not because they need the nutrients, it’s because they are desperately trying to clean up their nest site to keep it from smelling like meat and to keep predators away.
But this can make your rabbit extremely sick, usually from GI stasis or salt shutting down their kidneys, and runs the risk of creating a prion disease in rabbits. Don’t know what that is? It’s a disease that creates improperly twisting proteins in the body and brain. It’s mostly transmitted through strict herbivores eating meat infected with the disease. Still not familiar? In sheep, it’s called scrapie, in deer is’d Chronic Wasting Disease. In bovines, it’s called mad cow disease.
For god’s sake. Do not feed your rabbits meat. If they need calcium, protein, iron, fat, etc, just feed them some clover hay and give them a mineral block. Yeesh!

Hay or Death!

Nukka on top of our hay bales during our first year.

There’s this crazy idea that some people who are new to rabbits are getting that if you don’t feed your rabbits hay that they will die. This rumor comes primarily from vets and others in the pet industry. It’s one I have perpetrated myself on occasion. Pet rabbits are very different than production rabbits. They are smaller, often times spayed or neutered, with no environmental stresses on them at all. And products for these rabbits tend to be marketed to “pet” owners. Look at “Beneful” with it’s brightly colored cereal pieces, openly advertising the “whole grains” they add, or “Fancy Feast”, which implicates that your cat is royalty to be spoiled like a princess. The pet rabbit market is no different. Rabbit feed filled with sunflower and thistle seeds, dyed sugary cereal pieces and nuts covered in honey are in most “premium” rabbit feeds and sell extremely well. These feeds are extremely fatty, fattier than most “complete” rabbit feeds marketed for meat production and are much lower in fiber. Additionally, many pet owners like to further “spoil” their pets by giving them sugary treats such as yogurt drops or dried fruits, as well as making sure they have a full feeder 24/7.
When you combine the idea of these extremely fatty feeds with the idea of a “pet” rabbit, usually living in a small cage in a climate controlled environment without breeding, it’s a recipe for disaster. GI stasis, heart disease and congestive heart failure are not uncommon among pet rabbits. Pet rabbits are in a state of severe decline in health among most pet owners. So vets and others in the pet industry, in an attempt to educate people in the 10-20 minutes they have to sell them a product or talk about their pet at a checkup, tell people that if they do not feed their rabbits a diet of primarily hay (or at least feed some hay), their rabbit will get sick or die. And for a sedate, over-fed, stress-free pet rabbit, this is true. And since rabbits CAN live off of hay and minerals alone, a fortified hay based pellet or a hay based diet with a mineral lick is ideal for a pet (and can be ideal for production rabbits as well).
But this is not always true of meat rabbits. These rabbits are big, covered in lots of muscle, exposed to outside environments, and breeding. A litter puts a strain on a body. Milk production is a huge fat sink. Calories are needed to burn in cold winters. Production rabbits make use of the extra calories they consume, and production feeds are not as fatty as the sugar-loaded “pet” rabbit feeds, focusing instead on protein. A rabbit can, and many millions do, live well on pellets alone.
Haying is a personal choice that has more to do with moving towards personal food security, offering a more natural diet, stability of the GI tract in a variety-based diet, offering quality of life based environments, etc. A rabbit can live happily on pellets, and happily on hay, but neither is a death sentence when balanced correctly.

If You Eat Only Rabbit You Will Die

Rabbit starvation is a real thing. It’s also sometimes call mal de caribou and if you are ever out in the wilds keep it in mind. If you ever eat so much protein with no carbs and fats to balance it out, the protein can build up in your system and overload your body systems and you can die. In survival settings, especially in the winter, this can be your downfall as wild rabbit is easy to find and wild veggies are not.
But to equate this concept to a typical-world homesteading or farming situation is extremely far reaching at best.

An adult rabbit, slow-cooked with onions and herbs. We ate this with potatoes and carrots on the side. Yum!

The only way rabbit starvation works is by eating extremely lean meat with no carbs and fats for days or weeks on end as your sole food source. If you eat a salad, a carrot, a slice of bread, some potatoes, green beans, or a glass of milk with your rabbit, you will never experience this phenomena. Almost every vegetable, dairy, or grain product has plenty of fats and carbs to balance out the protein in the rabbit and make a complete diet. In fact, if you eat a bowl of oatmeal for breakfast and rabbit for dinner, you’re pretty much set right there. Experiencing rabbit starvation is very difficult in all but the most extreme of settings and isn’t practical to reference in almost any situation.

Rabbits are Silent or Always Quiet

Rabbits are generally quiet animals. They don’t make sounds… Most of the time.

Kibbles, one of our Rex rabbits, trying to dig through a hay bale.

Rabbits make some really quiet, really annoying sounds on a regular basis that will bother you quite a bit if you keep them indoors, especially near your bedroom. They like to dig and will dig at anything, even solid or wire floors. They will chew cage bars, scrabble in loud circles, and best of all they will stomp their hind feet as loudly as possible. And they do most of this at night.
But most people don’t realize that rabbits also vocalize. Many rabbits make grunting noises. This is mostly a mating call. But the real sound they make is a distress call, and can only be described as a scream. It’s loud, it’s piercing, it carries through blocks and neighborhoods. And it sounds distressingly like a human baby being brutally murdered with a knife. If you ever hear the most bone-chilling high pitched shriek of pain in your life carrying across your property, it’s time to book it to your rabbit barn ASAP and see what’s up!

I hope this clears up some common misconceptions about rabbits and helps you understand your rabbit’s behavior and physiology better! Good luck and happy rabbiting!

Rabbit Processing Demonstration

Today a teacher and five members of the Urban Livestock management class from Owens Community College in Toledo came to visit the homestead! It was an exciting day, and I was happy to have finished making my house look at least a little presentable in time.

We processed two rabbits today, bucks that decided to be most uncooperative, kicking and trying to run away the whole time, but otherwise the processing went well. After the class left I processed one more for our dinner this evening. The last two will be processed in the evening as it cools down a little.
The flies are desperate with all those organs sitting out, but little do they know their eggs will be bundled up in plastic bags and shipped to the landfill. A thousand less flies in my little corner of the world.
And keeping the furs moist in this heat has been very hard. For that matter doing anything in the heat has been hard.

So anyhow, the visit. The teacher, Joanne, was a great lady that I feel like I could be spectacular friends with, and asked a lot of great questions. She was sweet and enthusiastic. The students were as entirely unrelatable for me as anyone I’ve ever met in college outside of the local nerd and engineering school. They were all around my age but I find that I can’t relate with many people in their early 20’s at all. I’m in such a different point in my life, have such a different mindset, I throw myself into things with unbridled passion that most people don’t, and I never went to a normal school… Besides which I have a sister that bears all the pretences from just such an opposite lifestyle of my own and I have trouble tolerating her. Interestingly the class was all girls, and some of them were clearly a little more OK with getting the dirty work of farming done than others. Some seemed to have real plans for their futures… The rest I am not sure they’ll end up in farming at all.

I struggle to think that the future face of farming could be a (probably bleached) blonde with mascara delicately applied, hair straightened, and short shorts, chattering on a Smartphone behind their sunglasses with an attitude of a diva, but a look at this class could make one think otherwise. (A group description there.) This is not a lucrative career choice, nor one that’s clean or easy or one where you get to hug bunnies all day. It’s certainly not a career where you can maintain your look, act bigger than you are, or step away from the dirty work. Most of the people I know in this “biz” are lucky to brush their hair and put on a clean shirt every day as they humbly beg the earth to provide through blood, sweat and tears.

Two people (other than the teacher) were willing to watch the actual processing of the rabbits and none were willing to try their hand at processing their own, be it the butchering, the skinning or the gutting. After the first rabbit was done the class went to sit on the front porch in the shade. It didn’t help that this could be the hottest day of the year. The teacher stood by as I processed the other rabbit so she could buy a pair to take home.

The lack of participation was disappointing but not surprising. Think on when I processed my first batch of rabbits… How many people showed up? I asked dozens of people and only four showed. But these people are taking a class on livestock management and butchering your animals is an important part of that. What happens when your chickens hit three years and stop laying eggs? What happens when you breed your goats and find yourself with a pair of twin bucklings, useless for milk production and can’t even produce offspring? What happens to all those rabbits you breed and can’t sell to 4Hers or to people who have more guts than you? What about the day your cow gives birth to a deformed offspring that can’t be milked, shown or bred?

Recently urban chicken keeping has become very popular and people who are unwilling to take that step in management are dumping their unwanted chickens on animal shelters. Really? Yeah, really. We’ve seen it before in a smaller scale on farms where rescue workers have to come in and save dozens of starving farm animals. But now as “farming” becomes “popular” animal shelters have no idea what to do with the chickens they’re getting. It’s irresponsible and wasteful. And in theory you could send your animals to a butcher, but that is expensive. Large animals are $0.50/lb live weight, plus the cost to kill it ($80 at most butchers) so for a goat that’s $200 to get your animal processed. That could be $200 that you spend on your next project instead, or $200 to pay off your loans, or $200 to buy your groceries, feed your animals, pay that medical bill…

Life is a full cycle. Death is just a part of it, and one that’s unavoidable. It’s up to us to decide if the life and the death of an animal will impact the world and how it impacts the world. When an animal shelter euthanizes a dozen dogs which are then thrown in the trash, I feel like that’s a negative impact on the world that just makes people unhappy. There’s no benefit to a death like that. When a farmer butchers their turkey for thanksgiving it’s a death that can bring joy to the world! But a death is only positive if we make it happen.

I know which impact I’d rather have on the world. I hope the students figure it out what sort of impact they’ll be having as well. I hope they all make it in farming… And if they don’t I hope they find something more suitable to their own desires in life.

In the meantime, I’ll just be here on my homestead, eating some delicious rabbit, with fresh garlic and onions from my gardens. Mmmm~~!

Cleaning Up the Homestead

The past week or so has been a rough one. We have lost three rabbits (all kits thank goodness) due to various circumstances, two of our hens are broody, our garden is doing as well as any plant I have ever raised (which is to say poorly) and there’s so many things that need fixing, cleaning or replacing it’s incredible. And with me teaching a demonstration on harvesting rabbits for a college class in a week everything has to be ship-shape!

First the kits. We lost two from the litter of nine that Purina gave us and one of the boys growing in the garage. One of the younger kits decided to hide under the nest box and was crushed when all the other siblings got in it (or perhaps mom for feeding time). The second one died recently, we can only think it was from heat stroke but we’re not sure. It wasn’t even crazy hot out that day, but I just walked out to find it long dead in the back of the cage. We gave the rabbits frozen water bottles and we’re hoping we don’t lose any more.
The third rabbit we lost was the second smallest of the rabbits in my garage, all boys, growing out for meat. When I put together the grow out crates (Remember this?) I was in a pinch, low on cash, and needed a quick solution so I bought a $13 roll of the sturdiest deer netting I could find and slapped it on with my dad’s staple gun. Well, since then it worked for months. Then when I started getting baby rabbits consistently they started to chew through. None of the previous rabbits figured that out. Some of them would jump out, but not chew through! The last litter was the worst as they chewed about four holes in one cage. Then this litter began working their way through the other cage. One day after putting all the babies back I brought the dogs in the back yard. Nukka was loose as I went to care for the outdoor rabbits. The next thing I hear is a panicked squeal and I am running to the garage, dropping keys and anything else along the way shouting “NUKKA, NO!”. The wild baby rabbits had just been a few days prior.
Turns out the babies had chewed a hole I hadn’t seen and one felt the need to jump out again almost immediately. Nukka picked it up around the chest and shook it. Oddly she didn’t seem to have broken the skin but I knew right away that the rabbit wasn’t going to make it. I set up to butcher it to put it out of it’s misery and at least get some meat out of it. Nukka seemed rightly ashamed. She crawled out of the garage almost on her belly and lay down at my feet as I got close. She almost rolled onto her back to flash her belly, and she clearly knew (this time at least) that she’d made a terrible choice.
When I processed the rabbit I found the wounds; cracked ribs and punctured lungs filled with blood. I couldn’t find any breaks in the skin even though I tried. A few days later we had some roast rabbit for dinner and the chickens got the organs.

So thing #1 to fix; Grow cages. Actually I already did this. The walls are now metal chicken wire and there is a deer-netting roof instead. Since then? No escaped rabbits at all.

Additionally the baby rabbits somehow had been managing to escape the outdoor cages. I feel like there is a tiny gap in the bottom of the cage and they were deliberately jumping out (why can’t baby rabbits know that staying in one place is GOOD?) to explore. We swapped them into the cage above and moved Evo down below. No more escaped bunnies but that still needs to be sorted out some time.

Thing #2 to fix; Outdoor cages. Not actually sure how I am going to do this.

Our one broody hen started laying again just in time for a second one to go broody. That one should be laying again soon and I sure hope it’s today because a THIRD hen went broody just a few days ago. (Actually I think it was the first hen over again. She may be slated for the stewpot.) So we needed a way to confine her.
We also seriously needed a rabbit tractor. Our “broody buster” for the hens WAS our rabbit tractor, but it was also pretty small. Greg and I set down together and made an animal tractor.

Iams, formerly known as Purple, enjoying her time in the tractor. Iams is Purina’s kit kept over for replacing Evo as a breeder.

I just cut and screwed together some random pieces of wood we had lying around. The design is not the most sturdy; some 2X4’s, plywood, OSB and reclaimed cedar all with only 14 screws holding it in place… It’s wobbly but it works and it’s pretty big at 4’X4’X2′. Just a bit bigger than the cages the outdoor bunnies have. (technically theirs are like 46″X44″ or something.) We’re thinking of making a second, smaller one with what wire we have left or even getting more wire and making a bigger one.
At the end of the month our meat chickens will be coming in as well, so this will be essential to transitioning them outdoors and giving them lots of fresh grass to eat. I really want my animals on pasture more!

The lawn and garage are both a mess. I need to clean and organize both. I leave things scattered throughout my lawn as I work and so it looks pretty bad… A milk-jug here, a plastic bag there, a few random empty plastic pots… And the garage is just a bit of a nightmare with all the scarps of wood around!

I have to finish my strawberry bed. A very nice person got me some reclaimed garden brick edgers that make a circle and were foolishly being used for a square bed. I think they will do great around my strawberries. The strawberries have been the best part of my garden lately. They are ever-bearing so they have been blooming heavily for a while and are now starting to explode in big, red, sugary berries. Not enough to do anything with yet, but enough to enjoy. Additionally I managed to plant a few of the tiny, low to the ground wild strawberries in with my big, tall domestic ones and both kinds are spreading! I started with three plants (two domestic one wild) and now I have about a dozen. They have been sending out runners like mad and I am so delighted. Next year I may have enough to make something out of them!

How the berries looked a week ago. I picked the biggest one of these yesterday as it was already red and turning darker by the moment. Best strawberry I have ever had. There are also more flowers now.

The rest of my plants are only doing so-so. We harvested the peas a while back, and we’re hoping they’ll give us a second crop this year. Our arugula and kale are FINALLY coming in to the point we’ll be able to eat them. Our basil is doing fine and my mother gave me some sweet, mild, purple basil so we have a small forest of it. The cucumbers and zucchini are both blooming but the flowers keep falling off. Our big heirloom tomato is FINALLY blooming and I hope to get some big thick tomatoes out of it. None of the tomatoes I started from seed are more than about 5 inches tall. Poo. We went out and bought a whole bunch of discounted tomato plants recently, though, and we’re hoping to get a good fall crop from them!

The carrots are starting to really come in and the beet leaves are huge but I have no idea how the roots are doing. The onions I think are finally starting to grow their bulbs and most of my wild garlic has gone to seed. That’s good because I would like lots of garlic year after year!

Next year I think the garden will do much better. Come fall during the last days above freezing I will till in our brewing compost and scatter some of the worms I got earlier in the year on it. Then next year I will start my seeds early in more optimal conditions, and plant the seedlings in better locations (like the tomatoes in more sun and the spinach in the shade). Next year our garden will be epic. Live and learn.

The last thing that happened recently was the sudden acquisition of 1.5 gallons of mulberries and a whole box of over-ripe peaches. There was only one thing to do… MAKE LOT OF JAM! 😀

My sister and I sat down with half-a-dozen boxes of pectin, two grapefruits and three bags of sugar. By the end of this Monday we walked away with 10 jars of perfect mulberry jam, three jars of perfect peach/grapefruit marmalade, and 12 jars of somewhat runny peach jam. (All these jars are pints, not half-pint jelly jars!) We even tried re-processing the peach jam with more pectin, sugar and grapefruit juice to no avail. It’s just gonna have to be runny. Either way, not only are we set on jam for a year (or three) but we’re giving some to our parents and to the wonderful person that supplied the fruit to us completely free. It was a good (if hot and sticky) time. Next time I will post some pictures of our jam.

As a side note we ended up having to go to Wal-Mart for more jars much to my regret… The Mainstays Wal-Mart brand jars were just nowhere near as good as the true ball mason jars (they had ball jars there but not pints). We’re not sure all the Wal-Mart jars sealed correctly as some took overnight to pull down the lids… And the jars tried to leak air when we first put them in the canner. The ball jar lids pulled down within minutes every time and we didn’t have any such issues. Just don’t bother using anything but ball jars.

Let’s see how much work I can get done today. My demonstration is in one week. It looks like it’s going to be in-person but I could still record it or stream it if there’s any interest in this. I hope I can get everything finished by then! And after that the meat birds come in!

The work is never done…!