Farm, Farm, Farmity, Farm...

White Rabbit had babies! 11 babies!! Grey Rabbit had 2.. Grey rabbit's (she was pretty mad today so I didn't do this yet..) babies look like they are going to have pretty awesome coloring! We paired her with Domino this time and there was what looked like a white baby with a few black spots and then another that was not solid colored.

White Rabbit had a few solid dark colored, a few whites, and a few of the awesome looking mottled ones. The Boy counted the bunnies today and figured out that with the babies - we have like either 23 or 25 rabbits now. Compared to 1 year ago we just had the 2 Netherland Dwarf males that I got for free because the lady was done with them and wasn't taking care of them.. That's a lot of bunnies.

Our chicks from our last hatch are doing really well. So far we've only lost 1 of the ones that actually hatched out - and that was due to a very unfortunate drowning accident (fell into the giant big chicken watering bucket and couldn't get out). They're starting to feather some, but the hens are super protective of them.

 This guy is clearly a rooster - and he's only a few weeks old and we can already tell.

 These little ones still have quite a bit of fluff!

This is one of the girl Orpingtons we hatched out from the hatch directly before this last hatch. They are feathering out very nicely. The 2 (the rooster and one of the hens) that had 1 eye each blinded are actually starting to heal and open up a little.  I have to admit I really do like the Orpington temperament a lot. It's very calm, laid back. We can all just go pick them up, pet them, hold them easily. Where as with the dark Cornish we kind of have to chase them down a little and certainly wouldn't want to hold them.

This is the other little Orpington hen we hatched out hatch before last. 

This is the scene from the chicken yard today. It's starting to be fall. This will be the first fall in our house and the kids are somewhat fascinated with how fast the trees are changing colors. I must admit I am *not* looking forward to tending animals in cold, wet, nasty weather. Mostly because I can barely walk some days as it is, it just gets worse in the cold wet. eh. It'll just get warm and then hot again. Stinkin' seasons.

Wickedly Warped Wednesday..

Well, we had a hatch. I have to admit I'm somewhat disappointed with the outcome, even though it IS better than the last attempts and we did increase the variables. So, a success in that aspect - but I had higher hopes for it.

We started off with 16 duck eggs and 14 chicken egg (our eggs for the first time). We refrigerated them for 7 days at 55 degrees with no rotation while in refrigeration. We culled 3 chicken eggs because non-viablity at candling at various times. Of the chicken, we had 5 hatch with 1 dying because one of the big chickens umm.. well.. Pecked it's head open. Of the ducks, we had a higher viability rate - only 1 was culled. We only had 5 hatch. All 5 had to be helped hatching though, as they couldn't get out of the shell on their own. There are 2 that have 1 sided blindness. (The same thing happened to the Buff Orpingtons we hatched out last time. We don't know what's happening. We suspect the flies are biting their eye, but I put fly netting over them so it would be a super sneaky fly and the ducks don't have the little pecky beaks like little chicks. I'm going to have to research this more because this is the second batch of hatch outs we've had with this problem.)

Conversely, we gave Matilda - one of our Dark Cornish hens 6 random eggs just as we were collecting them to sit on and she hatched them with with a 100% success rate. We also gave someone else 24 chicken eggs out of this same refrigerated batch and they had to cull 1 and had a success rate of 16/23.  I think I am most disappointed about the ducks. I was hoping for more of those to hatch out cause they are so darned cute. I kind of wanted a little army of them.

 This is the only light colored one of the bunch. It's also one of the one sided blind ones. It's laying in the warm spot taking a nap.

This little guy has figured out how to take a little bath in the water. The water is right in the warm spot too, just so they won't get to cold until they get their little feathers all grown in. 

For our fall breeding we also have 2 does (bunnies) due soon too! Our little grey bunny and White rabbit are both due to have their second litters one Monday the (28th). For a short period of time, we're going to have 3 litters of babies with their mommies. We planned it this way - sort of. We poorly planned Black Bunny's litter. But. We wanted to have litters available for pets and food the right size near Christmas, and in order for THAT to happen we needed them to be born.. nowish. See, I can plan. Sort of. 

Black Rabbit has had a litter of 6. She turned out to be our 1 animal so far that is a horrible, miserable mother and the second day - 3 of the 6 died. For the first 10 days we would have to go and keep checking to make sure the remaining 3 were warm (as they were frequently out of the nesting box and super cold) and put them with her for her to feed. Now the 3 babies are 3 weeks old and usually way too young to be eating or away from her - have started eating hay and pellets and lettuce. 

They are HUGE. Well over a pound already. They are our biggest babies by far. This little guy has the best coloring EVER - it's a mottled brown/red with grey. He has the same dad and Dopey. I can't WAIT to breed Dopey and see what he has. But, since this Black Doe is such a horrid mom, we're going to give her one more try once these 3 are fully weaned and see if she's figured it out. Otherwise, we'll have to sell her and pick up another doe. We can't even use any of THESE babies to replace her - as they'd most likely be bad too.

We're also getting a new - GIANT - barn built! We need the extra room in the house, so we're going to move the stuff that's in the *shed* now into the new barn and make the *shed* into the full fledged rabbitry! It's pretty big so it'll be for storing the animal foods (and the big extra freezer and fridge) and bunnies! The new barn will be for big animals when it's cold - the goats and dogs - and the lawn mowers, wood, tools, stuff that normally goes in a garage. Then we'll transform the garage into a MIL suite type thing for my mother. It's already got a little sink out there and eventually put a little bathroom out there. It already has it's own entrance, and we can make a little cabinet, microwave, mini-fridge area for her. The barn should be built by the end of next week! Then we can move the kids into their own rooms. Hopefully, they'll sleep better - at least maybe they'll stop - heck it probably won't stop or change anything. They probably won't be able to sleep for the first 2 weeks because they're *afraid* to be alone..

Sad News

Unfortunately, Black Momma didn't do a very good job with her babies. 3 of her 6 didn't make it past the second day :( The 2 white and one of the mottled ones are no longer viable in the nesting box. We don't know if it's because this is her first litter, she didn't pull hair until too late and they got cold, she sat on them. We just don't know.

The remaining 3 are very fat and are starting to get their fuzzy. We're checking them daily now to make sure everyone is still doing ok.

Black Bunny Babies!

Black Bunny had her babies yesterday! She had a total of 6: 2 black, 2 white/albino, 2 mottle black!

Aren't they so preciously gross??  No fur, eyes glued shut.

 We're trying to track the genetics of the buck we have. He CLEARLY has the albino gene (The 3 albinos from his first litter with White Rabbit and then these 2 whites from his second).  From what I can figure there are 5 genes that play in rabbit *fur* and albino is recessive but if 2 recessives are displayed it over-rides ALL of the other 4..?

 So I'm going to look into that further, since we do not really like the white with red eye, if these 2 white looking ones have red eyes (and we do a couple more test breeds to confirm this suspicion) we may replace this buck with one that may not have this recessive. We kept Dopey, but if both buck and doe have recessive albino genes, then he is most like a recessive carrier and we were planning on putting him with Black Rabbit - who we know now is a recessive carrier... We would still end up with some albinos.  Stinkin' red eye rabbits. 

Fall Breeding is HERE!

Well, sort of.

 Eggs are in the incubator: 16 random duck and 14 random chicken. We know the possible combinations are possible just not which male *dated* which female. This particular batch of eggs was supposed to go to a guy who didn't care and just wanted eggs to hatch out. Since we hadn't tested fertility, I was going to sell them to him at the same price as eating eggs and just have him basically do our test hatch. BUT the day he was supposed to come get 60 eggs, his barn and incubator burned. So, 30 egg went into our incubator, 24 into someone else's that my mom knows and we had to throw the rest away. (Oy, that's hard to do..) I checked them today - it's day 5 - and all but 3 of the 30 have distinct veining so far!! We are so excited since we weren't even really sure they were fertile! A whole flock of little ducklings would be SOOO cute!

Our Black doe (I can't remember that poor rabbit's name for the life of me.. I currently call her Fat Black Rabbit or Rabbit with a Giant Dunlap) is due to have her litter Monday! She is working on her nest, but not pulling fur yet.. We probably shouldn't all be so excited by a rabbit having babies, but we are. Unabashedly so. Me, mostly for the genetics of it (we used Sausage - who is black but together with Hazel had 3 albino babies in their first litter ) The kids think it's fascinating to watch the Momma with the babies when they are tiny and are still trying to figure out how the Momma's take care of the babies.

We also got to talking about which rabbit(s) we wanted to breed. We figured having a rabbit or two to sell around Christmas time would be ideal and did the whole count backward thing. Then realized that we would need to breed NOW(ish) to make THAT happen. So we bred Sausage to White Rabbit and Anna (the Grey Netherland Dwarf) to Domino (the speckled Netherland Dwarf). It'll be really interesting to see what colors White Rabbit and Sausage have a second time and what Anna and Domino have. *Looks slightly ashamed* I'm a dork.

Although. Of all the babies so far, we are getting them all settled before the next litters are being born.  We aren't being like some of the freakish breeders with 650 babies who have to go to auction and sell the babies at 4 weeks for $3 because of poor planning. All of our litters are purposeful and planned and we wait until we KNOW where all the babies are going before we put 2 bunnies together. We have 1 bunny left from this last litter that we aren't keeping, but it's to feed up for someone - so even it is spoken for.

We went to the Fair today too! We saw a kind of duck we hadn't seen before and plan on trying to find a pair of :) They have the shiny dark green shimmery feathers. I guess some people go to the Fair for food or things to buy. We went to look at birds..  C saw the baby sheep and decided he wanted one, but I suggested that we slow down and actually *research* first BEFORE we acquire something else we have no idea anything about.

Hopefully, I will be posting pictures in the next day or so of baby bunnies!! Squee! 

Bunnies!! Updated..

The baby bunnies are about 5 1/2 weeks old now - in about 2 more weeks we'll start selling them. They've all grown exponentially! We've all chosen an favorite and decided to keep him.

Oddly, this little guy, Dopey, was the runt of the litter BY FAR and is now the biggest by several ounces. Not that we were all sneaking him extra food at all.. Nope. We've never done that. But this is also the only one of the bunch that has a *real* name and that the kids actually play with.   They pet the others to tame and pet friendly them, but they aren't attached to them. This was the plan - so it's good they got it. We let Dopey run around the house for short periods of time with the cats too - he's still a little small to be left alone with a clawed 13 pound cat so we keep the visits short.

These are the 3 white Demon Bunnies:

 Flop - the Demon Bunny with 1 flopped ear.

 Tubby - the Fattest of the 3 Demon Bunnies

 Tiny - the Smallest of the litter when we weighed them tonight. 

We only named these 3 because they ARE so identical so we named them by identifying features to make selling them easier when referring to them with the kids. (You know, so we aren't going "Can you grab that one bunny, you know the white one with red demon eyes?" and getting brought 3 bunnies by giggling children.) 

These are the 2 black bunnies: 

 Black Bunny # 1 

 Black Bunny #2

We named them SUPER creatively: 1 and 2. These two black bunnies aren't nearly as identical as the whites. 

And then the lone dark brown:

It IS named "You Know, The Dark Brown One". We're awesome, I know.

C is taking a BIG batch of roosters and drakes to bring home in dinner sized packages tomorrow. Well, 6 roosters and 3 drakes - so about 1/4 to 1/3 of our total flock. The drakes have been completely mauling the females and they are almost bald from it. They look so pathetic from it.

THIS:

Is Steve! There's a lot of random Cloudy with a Chance of Meatball jokes floating around continuously now. Not gonna lie, I start most of them. Steve came pre - shot, health tested,  friendly with other animals, neutered paid for, and litter box trained. He's fitting in pretty well. He's about 10ish weeks old maybe? The vet was pretty unsure exactly how old he is, but it's not like a week or 2 either way matters. He weighs 3.9 pounds today. 

Baby Update!

I took new pictures of the babies today at day 12! They are stinkin' adorable! Their eyes have just opened and they are slinking around the cage chasing their Momma around trying to get more food almost continuously.

The 3 white rabbits. 

The 2 brown bunnies.

The 2 black bunnies.

All 7 together in the same basket as the first pictures. The growth is just exponential! The little light brown guy is just the most adorable of them all. 

I also have 7 Orpington eggs in the incubator right now.  We're on day 19 so I've stopped turning them and I'm doing experiments on ways to get and keep the humidity higher. We've had several hatching probelms in the past because the humidity hasn't been high enough. *RIGHT NOW* (because I just checked it) it's sitting at 99.5 and 81% so perfect. Hopefully it'll stay good all night. I really want to figure out what our hatching issues were. We'll find out soon I guess.

Ohhh More Babies!

White rabbit had her babies! She had 7 total here they are at 4 days old:

 3 white babies

1 dark and 1 light brown baby. (The light brown is totally my favorite rabbit we've had so far.)

2 black babies. 

I've got to admit I've totally become smitten by the tiny little light brown one. C says we can keep the little fella and work him into the breeding schedule since he IS so different to play with colors! YAY! Yeah, it's the small bizarre things that make me happy. 

The Netherland Dwarf babies will be ready to be sold in the next week or so. We will probably keep 1 if we can reverify that it IS a doe. (Yeah, we still have no true idea what we're doing, but we're doing it well :p ) They've gone from SO small to bunny size in 7 weeks! 

Those are all 3 the same Bunny! The last is Charles taken yesterday, at 6 1/2 weeks. Charles is the one we are probably going to keep and breed to Oreo. Ooooh the colors that we could get could be fun!

This is Oreo. He weighs a little over 2 pounds and it's not looking like these babies are going to be BIG so probably the standard Netherland Dwarf 2 pounds or under.. But all the others in the litter were the same color as the Momma doe. Yep. We actually sit around and talk about the color of bunny rabbits. Not for any purpose other than to see what colors we think we might be able to make. I guess when that stops being amusing, it's time to stop having bunnies. Clearly, we aren't there yet.


Oh we also go these the other day!

These big fluffy ladies are Buff Orpingtons. They are young laying age and have settled into a fairly nice laying pattern after a few days of getting acquainted with their new barn mates. We got them mostly as a compromise for the fluffies the goats stepped on and killed, but these things are pretty funny. They *talk* when they lay in these odd quirls and chirks (for the lack of a better description of it.) We have 1 Orpington rooster I've named it "Opie" because it's reddish and well. Why not?

Look at this big boy! Adams is weighing in at a full 50 pounds now and he looks so ferocious!

 The geese are big now too :) And they bite everyone but me! BWAHHAHHAHA!

 One of our egg layers! She likes to lay them in a different place every single day. Although, now we actually CAN play "Duck, Duck, Goose"!

Not So Patiently Waiting

This whole *farm* thing requires Patience. A lot of it. Waiting for this to grow, that to hatch, this to start laying.. It to get hotter, colder, drier, wetter. I am not a patient person. I want things to happen. Now.

White rabbit is DAYS away from having a litter. DAYS. She's a giant fat rabbit right now. HUGE. 3 chins, lays on her side and all possible times, growls if you go near her cage. White rabbit has always been our friendliest rabbit. Now she hisses and growls. She's due soon. She's been playing with building burrows and nests but has seemed dissatisfied with them all, so we put a big wooden (so she can chew it)nesting box in her cage for her to see if that makes her happy. She bit me twice getting it IN but she's been arranging IN it so I guess in bunny land that's a like? We're all so excited since this is our second attempt at baby bunnies. We've got a bet at how many she'll have - since it's her first litter. C has 6 or more - I took 5 or less. She's a flemish giant/lop so she *could* have 11 or more.

Soon the Netherland Dwarf babies will be ready to sell. We've decided to keep any that are female. Unless they're all female. We don't want that many. We'd breed that female back to Domino, the other Netherland Dwarf buck we've got. These bunnies are more costly to obtain because they are harder to breed so if we have a couple of sets of good breeders the bunnies may be able to at least pay for their own food. (White Rabbit and the other black doe, Jefferson, are for meat purposes or cheap pets primarily. We've found that it's actually very difficult to find Netherland Dwarfs. Aiming for a supply/demand thing.) But, the babies are too small still for me, at least, to tell gender. So I may have to see if I can hit up some of the rabbit people I've met and see if *they* can tell of if we just need to wait longer.  Won't that be an odd message "Hi, you don't know me. But can you tell me if this has a winky?" Yeah.

Then there's the chicken problem. The problem? The goat(s) have killed all the little fluffy ones from our hatches. Lambie stomped on the last remaining one last night..The ONLY good news is that it wasn't the puppies. They didn't even drag it around after the salsa lesson. Those fluffies were (particularly the orange flufflies), of course, the birds The Boy were attached to. So we're looking for a few Big birds that are orange and fluffy and full sized that would fit into the current flock we've got. I came across the buff orpington and so far that or the buff cochin seem like a good match. Right now is the *wrong* time of year to try to find laying aged birds. I have never seen either of these either. But, when has that stopped us? That's right. Never. We've been looking for a few weeks, but haven't struck the winning lotto on hens yet. I'm thinking there's some magic way to look for them and just don't know what it is.

But this all requires waiting. I hate waiting. I want it to be magical and POOF! Alas, it seems to not work that way. We have to wait for things to happen on their own.

Animal Mayhem...

When the animals go loony, WOW. They all go crazy. This weekend we've had to capture 6 ducks, 5 chickens, 2 goats, and 5 guineas and put them back into our yards. One rooster got his head caught 2 separate times (yes, the same stupid rooster) in the fence. (IN as in we had to cut a part of the fence he was so stuck). The goat, Jack, knocked down part of the fence being a giant PITA and let 2/3 of the farthest yard out and they were all taking a nice stroll down our easement road.  I found a frog in what I thought was an empty fish tank. It had been there for who knows how long.

Jack has gotten very aggressive with everyone lately. Thankfully, I have a friend who has a lot of goat knowledge and she has taken him to the equivalent of goat detention and is going to work with him and let him be with the big goats for a while to see if that straightens him out. I'm hoping this works because we'd tried everything we could think of and just couldn't figure out how to keep him contained and not hurting the kids and everything anymore. :(


The little puppies aren't so little anymore either!

But even these two have gotten crazy! They are somehow sneaking from yard to yard but we can't figure out how! We've blocked every possible way we can find, but they keep sneaking over every time we aren't looking. This, in itself, isn't a problem. We worry they'll do this with an outside edge and get OUT out. THAT would be a HUGE problem.

The Farm at 6 Months!

We've lived at our new house for almost exactly 6 months now. Overall, it works really well. It has some HUGE pluses.

• The scenery is gorgeous.
• The house layout and space suits our needs soo much better than the old house did. I mean - the closets, pantry, porch... What's not to love about those??
• We have the freedom to choose what animals (ducks, chickens, dogs, cats, goats, guineas...) without worry about the city freaking out since we live just outside the limits. But juuuuussst barely outside. 
• I love the kitchen layout. There is plenty of cupboard space. The pantry is HUGE for grocery storage. I've been able to can stuff and store it (not freakish like, but a few things of jam and sauces). I love the stove top griddle. 

• I can safely send the kids out to play in a BIG space and the biggest worry is them getting lost in the woods - not cars (because I send them out back, not to the highway), child thieves, or boredom.

There are a few things that I really don't like. They're goofy, out of my mind, stupid to mention things. But every time I have to deal with them, I get irritated.

• The bicyclists.  The HUNDREDS of bicyclists. That alternate between pedestrian rules and automobile rules. They want to be special and have both. I want to run them ALL over. Mostly, just the ones that ride 4 to 7 abreast and take up the ENTIRE road going 23 miles per hour. The entire time but won't let you pass, go around, or find an safe way to bypass them. EVER. It makes a 6 minute trip take 20. Literally. I timed it more than once. 
• Bugs, spiders, flies, scorpions, moles, snakes and other creepy crawlies. There are a bazillion of them. EVERYWHERE. All The Time. 
• The air conditioner doesn't work nearly as well as I would prefer. It's the middle of summer so I'm pretty sure no ones is, but *I* want the AC to work so it cools to like 65 at the drop of a hat. It doesn't. It functions adequately and sufficiently for the time being given that it is the original of the build. We did have to add a super air filter but it can go to a new unit whenever we are forced to upgrade.
• My allergies have been literally a daily battle since we moved. Stupid outside world. 

So the baby Netherland Dwarf are getting HUGE for being 14 days old!

 These were actually taken a few days ago, they are even a little bit bigger even! They look so much like little bitty bunnies now for just a few days ago!

Look at the differences!

BABY BUNNIES!!!

We are so excited, our first baby bunnies were born last night! The little grey Netherland Dwarf doe had 3 little babies that are all healthy and fairly big considering her size. We pulled them out of this giant nest she built the day before and looked at them and took pictures. They are healthy, fat, wiggly looking little fur-less blind babies. Not to mention we are all super excited because we doubted the level of success we would have. Not only had we heard and read that Netherland Dwarfs were the hardest to breed, but who doesn’t doubt their first attempt at anything?  These babies are to be sold as pet bunnies – they should be less than 2 pounds – the White Rabbit is our meat doe and we will probably breed her in the next month or so since she’s getting close to 7 pounds. Those babies will be raised to be fat and then for food (for people or snakes or whatever). 

Aren't they so cute, but grotesque at the same time??


We've also been getting visits from some deer who have taken an interest in the goat food. They've figured out how to work their tongues through the fence into the goat food buckets we've got hanging and just snack away! (Excuse the really, really bad pictures - it was the best I could do without spooking them.)

Look really close and you can see the glowing eyes. The deer had been snacking out of the goat food. It's hilarious. It drives the ducks and big house dogs insane. Absolutely, wildly insane.


And for the random joy of it:

 Just look at that giant Rupert!