Sunday, February 3, 2008

Bunnies and Greenhouses and Gardens, Oh My!

I'm not very good at keeping up with this blog. It seems like I'm so busy actually doing things that I can't find time to write about them. We've made some significant strides in our journey toward self sufficiency in recent weeks. Our new composter arrived and was promptly put in place. I assembled our tiny greenhouse and was proud of myself for having set it up, only to discover the following morning that I had placed it such that it completely shades the garden! Good thing it's small and portable! I'm scouting new locations for it today.

Planting will begin in earnest soon. I have some cooler weather vegetables that I plan to sow directly into the garden in coming weeks. Some of the warm weather crops will get a head start in the greenhouse. It does stay remarkably warm inside it, so I think it will work out well!

After lots of research, discussion and putting out feelers, we brought home our first breeding trio of rabbits - New Zealand Whites, one buck and two does. That was after a crash course in rabbit sexing, which we realized on the spot that we had no idea how to do (duh!). The buck is 4 weeks old and the does are three weeks, so they'll have lots of time to settle in before they're old enough to be bred. If all goes well, we hope to have our first litter of baby rabbits in late summer or early fall. Our intention is to raise them for meat, both for our own consumption and to sell, but we could also sell them as pets, sell the babies as reptile food and sell all the manure that we don't use on our own garden, so it seems like it will provide us with lots of options. No, they will not have names!

In other news, we may have a line on a nice piece of property in the country with a house, a pond and two barns. It will most likely be a lease-to-own situation if it works out, and would allow us to greatly expand our activities. We could install wind turbines, plant a bigger garden and raise chickens! Even goats! I'm quite excited about this, but it's far from a done deal, so let's all keep our fingers crossed!

1 comment:

  1. Naming them is not a strange as you would think. We have found that if we know we are eatting " slutty chicken", or " Mangy chicken" it does not really make it as weird as you would think. I don't know maybe we are just sick in the head. I think the trick is to not develop personal relations ships with them. Well, unless it is like Dinner and the relationship was hate.

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