Homestead and Folly

As the weather grows colder and the days shorter, it is the end of my summer garden. I pulled the last of the tomato plants and hung them in the kitchen to ripen. They look festive, like tomato garland. I continue to chop wood everyday and it will feel strange when there is no more wood to chop. The real excitement right now is all about the rabbits. Chopping Wood Tomato Garland Our rabbit had kits! I haven't actually seen them yet but I felt one. Having read many "how to" books about gardening, home improvement and  raising animals I am struck with how usual it is for my own experience to fall short of what the books say. However, with getting this Doe, mating her to the buck and having her babies it has all been exact and matches the book perfectly. When she grew restless and and started rubbing her face on everything like a cat, we put her in the Buck's cage. As per our book's description, he chased her,...

Chicken stored for the winter The meat chickens were processed this week. I was sad to cart my meat chickens off but the weather is getting colder, they were getting so heavy they were sitting down to eat and they were becoming a bit harder to look after requiring me to re-fill their water three or four times a day and hunting anyone and anything for food. Also the day before they were to be taken to be processed,  a hawk was flying right over our yard, hunting them. My mom spotted the hawk and her and I rounded up the meat chicks and put them safely in their tractor, then shooed the layers to semi-safety. It was tiring and about the last thing I wanted to be doing in that moment but a hawk will swoop down and carry off even the heaviest of chickens so we had to act. After the cost of feed, processing and gas to get there, we ended up saving about $2.50 per pound. We ended up with 69 lbs of meat in the freezer. All in all, worth it but that isn't the most valuable thing...

This week we are reminded of our inexperience. We think our Doe rabbit is pregnant and now we are scrambling around to find another tractor for her daughter as apparently you can't leave them together after her new babies come because she may either attack her eldest daughter or eat her babies. I don't know, something like that. We had read you could just put a screen between the two but now we are thinking it will be too tight in their current accommodations. Their current hutch/tractor is leaking a bit and I am wondering if we need to make serious modifications as you aren't supposed to let the rabbits get wet. We are left scrambling. She is due in a few weeks. We are also supposed to build/buy a box for the pregnant doe to kindle in. We are in the learning curve stage where we begin to wonder if this was such a good idea. I remember it with the first layer chickens but eventually we worked out all of the kinks, redesigned their coop many times and now have a great sys...

I met my son from the school bus and we went over to hang with our meat chickens when all of a sudden he says "mom, one of the chicks is bloody!" I looked down and saw some old blood on the chicken's neck but these things usually look worse than they are. I went to get a box and Riley scooped up the injured chick without even being asked. He has seen this before and seems to know just what to do. I grabbed a cardboard box, a handful of wood shavings and set the chick down inside. I put a bit of water and some food in there with him, went back to the yard and shooed the rest of the chicks away from their new favorite spot, the neighbour's tree. When I went back to check on the injured chick I noticed a lot of blood drops on the new shavings and said "uh oh". I picked him back up, grabbed an old shirt and wrapped him up so he couldn't hurt himself or me and held him pressed to me and went inside. I sat on the couch and had a look at what was bleeding...