Growing Pains

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 system and don't give much extra thought to the layers unless one of them is sick or broody. Growing pains.

We have 14 meat "chicks" which are now bigger than the layer rooster and have taken to lazing around rather than free-ranging. They still free range too but not as much. I fear they have gotten too big too fast. The processing place is overbooked and we can't get an appointment for almost a month so we may end up processing some of the biggest ones ourselves. They are greedy but curious too.

2 month old meat chick

Today I arrived home to a beautiful warm fall day and decided to let our latest mama layer and her two tiny chicks out. I made a makeshift cardboard playpen out of a giant cardboard box that would allow them to scratch at the ground. I went to pick the mama up as we often did with the last broody hen but this time she freaked out! Not a small 2 alarm freak out but a full on peck me, feathers flying, stepping on her baby freak out. Something I should mention is we call this hen BFH, short for Big Fat Hen. I know, it isn't very pc but really this hen is three times the size of her sisters and feathers puffed she was the size of a turkey.

Average sized Australorp hen and two month old layers

Anyway, I decided against this plan without reinforcements. Later, my husband lifted her up as she fought and I gathered her offspring and we moved them to their playpen outside where they are currently enjoying learning how to scratch the ground with their mom.

Enormous Australorp hen with two 3 day old chicks

The other major project other than ongoing fire wood processing are my two mini hoop houses. They were pretty easy to put together but it is discouraging seeing all of my baby kale with the new leaves eaten off by bugs. I am hoping I didn't just build two nice hoop houses to sit empty all winter. There are some carrots and nice red leaf lettuce still there from late summer so I am experimenting to see if they will grow.  I just planted spinach, yes it is kind of late but there was an empty spot where I pulled some lettuce so I decided to put something, anything in, and just see how it does. So far we are having hot sunny days and chilly nights much like late spring. Who knows.

I bought a mini-van for transportation and also to haul things in and act as a truck. Tomorrow I will take out the seats, line it with tarp and back it up the lane to the woodpile where I will load it up and drive it down to the house to stack onto my porch to use as the season's first firewood. Sometimes it seems like all we do is move wood, poop and dirt around the yard from one spot to the next. Still, I would rather shuffle wood, poop and dirt around at my job, than paper.