Homestead and Folly

We have been raising rabbits for meat for almost a year and having gone through a long, cold winter now, I have tallied the costs and they don't look good. When it comes down to it, the way we raise rabbits in wood shavings in a hutch, with a tractor for access to fresh weeds and grass is too expensive. Either they have to go or we have to find a better way. Sometimes when we ran out of bedding last winter, we would use some of the rabbit's food hay as bedding for them,and it worked fine. We ran out of hay but I got to thinking about the insulating properties. You drop a glob of hay in and the rabbits break it up, chew some and stand on some. They make a nest out of it and sleep in it. Rabbits are very clean animals and I have read if you keep them clean they will not have problems or parasites. We need to cut out the wood shavings and switch to hay. Hay is $4.00 a bale and wood shavings are $8.00 a bag. The hay is half the cost and lasts twice as long. My next probl

After a few false starts where I thought my zucchini looked like it was producing only to discover the small zukes had rotted from being unfertilized, I took matters into my own hands...literally. I began taking pollen from the male flower and gently placing it in the female flower with the tip of my finger and tho this made me feel slightly dirty, it produced some very nice zucchinis. Stalled, sick pole beans My pole beans were off to a promising start and then they stalled out, turned yellow and then got red edges. They have not grown in weeks and I am fairly certain they have a virus or bacteria. I have always planted pole beans and they have always done well. Well, they are dead. Fail.  Luckily I also planted bush beans in the hoop house so I will still have a few green beans to eat but not the haul I usually get around my bean tee-pee. The Mini-hoop house experiment has shown me just how much further along heat-loving plants get while sheltered from th