False pregnancy, kind of...

Gertrude was put in with Peter on May 16th, so she was due between June 13-16th. On June 10th I gave her a nesting box and she set about happily making her nest, all was well with the world.

June 16th came and went, no kits.... I waited and waited, nothing.

June 20th, I removed the nesting box because it was clearly a false pregnancy.

The morning of June 22nd, a single deceased kit appeared in her cage with her. 

Peculiar, none of my rabbit friends have never heard of such a thing and we can only surmise that the kit died before the due date and her body finally removed it.

Very sad and unfortunate.

 

Rabbit tractors

The rabbit tractors are made, these are the tractors (cages) that the rabbits grow up in on the grass. I needed something to put on them for shade and found at Home Depot some corrugated plastic in a multitude of colours. I chose yellow because it is a happy colour, more suitable than red, blue or green I thought.

For the record, they are completely covered with heavy gauge mesh, the plastic is only for shade purposes...

The bunnies love having fresh grass every day as you might imagine.

Mabel's due date

Well today, May 6, is Mabel's last technical due date... sometimes they can run late up to 3 days but I looked inside her nesting box this morning and saw nothing new, no fur and even felt around in the back there to make sure. Yup, nada. Guess she's not pregnant after all.

This afternoon I took over some grass for the rabbits to enjoy while I collected the chicken eggs. I wasn't even looking but FUR caught my eye.... sure enough the fur was 'breathing' from the kits underneath squirming around. 

Because I do not know if this is her first breeding, I decided to leave the kits alone until tomorrow (Sat).

Then when I went out to put everyone to bed for the night, I grabbed more grass for them and decided that since she would be busy eating that it was a perfect chance to check on the kits.

10!!!

10 new teeny tiny all black kits delivered by Mabel during the night last night. Wowsers.

This gives us a total of 16 kits delivered in the last week.

Oh, and also I was at The Great Canadian Superstore (Grocery chain) yesterday and came across this, by chance:

Frozen Rabbit

$17.61/KG CAD

($6.20/Lb USD)

You could have knocked me over to find this in the shops.

1st Kits have arrived

Quite naturally, I forgot to take the phone with me and hence do not have a picture yet. Here is one off the web which looks the same but for the number of kits.

Gertrude had 6 kits on May 1st. 5 are black and 1 looks surprisingly white (hairless and pink at the moment).

Mable has developed her 2nd chin and has begun making her nest. 

I expect the 2 deliveries to be fairly close as Gertrude delivered on the last day of her 'expected' due dates. 

Hopefully Mable's delivery will be faster in case I need to (unlikely, but...) move some of her kits over to Gertrude in the event that she has a large litter. This fostering is only possible if the deliveries are within a few days of each other.

I did pick each one up today ( 24 hours after birth) to accustom them to the feel of human hands, one is larger than the rest and one is far smaller than the rest.

If the pink one does indeed prove to be white -- and female, she will become the new Mable.

Garden begins and Kits are imminent

And so it begins.... the garden is being put in. Weed fabric is down and we put a bird net over the top ( I didn't think to get a picture of... later, I will.

Weed fabric. Garlic strip on right under straw for winter

Uncovering the garlic for sunshine and ~20 mm (3/4") rain 'they' say we're getting.

Gertrude is setting up her nest and she was pulling hair yesterday which usually means kits are imminent. Nothing as yet though.

Here are some updated pictures of them all:

Peter

Gertrude (with nesting box)

Nesting box is being renovated to accommodate the babies (kits)

Mabel 

(seems to be getting a double chin so we'll see)

All 12 chickens having a blast in the chicken run

We are super excited to get our first set of kits from Gertrude anytime now. Also quite hopeful that Mabel is pregnant too but I am still unsure about her. She will be going to freezer camp anyway because she attacked Peter and we don't want to breed aggression. 

 

RIP Bambi

Sadly when I went out Saturday morning to the animals I found Bambi had died in the night. She had seemed fine the night before.

We have no idea what happened. She was given nothing unusual to eat and nothing got in to the barn... she just went. 

Peter and Gertie are fine. There is just no explanation for why Bambi died.

I will still wait until she has been here 2 weeks to breed Gertie, this will give her time to adapt fully to us and her new surroundings. I did clean out Bambi's cage and put Gertie in there so that she would have Peter as a friendly neighbour and they could get used to each other.

I will say that Peter was far more excited when I put Gertie in beside him than he was about Bambi, likely because his spidey senses are tingling now that he knows what thats about.

Regardless of everything it is hard to lose any animal who's life you are responsible for so I was a bit out of sorts for a while. We just don't know what happened. 

Some friends suggested we do an autopsy to see if we could find out anything but we decided that dead is dead and as she wasn't fed anything unusual there wouldn't be much to find. And as we don't know what she died from, using her meat would not be an option either.

Homestead update

Our good son turned 12 on Dec 1st... he is, by far the oldest person in the house now at 84. In fact, he's now older than either Grandma!!

Officially 12 years old now

This side he gets from his father :D

Chilling with the kiddos ( Brad & I ) watching TV

So you may recall that I like gadgets. Well, I have a gadget in the chicken coop/rabbitry so that I can monitor the temperature out there (keep in mind this is our first time raising chickens and rabbits).

During that super cold (polar vortex) spell we just had, this is the result. Now, I do have a heat lamp in the chicken coop which comes on about 6am-8am and again 6pm-9pm. Overnight however, they are on their own for body heat so I wanted to make sure I wasn't killing them....

We were getting about 10-11 eggs a day until I found the hiding spot which held 22 eggs... we are now getting the full monty of 14 eggs for 14 chickens.

Note: the red is -20C or colder.

December

Outside temperatures & RH

December

Coop temperatures & RH

The backyard is beautiful with all the snow. The paths are to the coop/rabbitry and also heads to the right for the cats in the pump house (pump house is heated so the farm cats live in there).

Some seeds are in...

These seeds (and many more) I ordered from Wildrose Heritage Seed Co. here in Alberta. They are heirloom (non-gmo), local and they send them in a zipper mylar so that you can save your own seeds at the end of the season, which I absolutely love. Unfortunately, they didn't have every seed we wanted so I also ordered from Heirloom Seed Vault also in Alberta, but those seeds have not arrived yet.

Meanwhile, though.... the shelving and grow lights have arrived and I managed to get it all set up in the basement. I put my St John's Wort. and a brand new ginger plant under the lights hoping to give them a little extra boost. 

St John's Wort above, ginger below

My SJW is essentially on its last legs and I desperately want to save it. I'm not sure if its an easily accessible plant, not that I ever looked for one before but as soon as I saw one I bought it and do not want it to die on me.

 

Liver treats, Peter and Bambi

I bought 4 packages of liver for about $6 each and cut them into bite sized pieces for freeze drying as treats for Robbie.

The finished product was 3 quart jars which will last him about 3 months... cheap like borscht. 

Remember 'Blackie'?...

That name just wouldn't resonate with me, even after 4 or 5 days, I just couldn't get it into my head so today we changed his name to Peter, Yay! :D

Bambi

This morning I drove into the city to pick up our doe and I named her Bambi. No reason, it just came to me as such and I went with it.

L-R: Bambi and Peter

Bambi was born Aug 8th and Peter Sept 16th. As you can see, Bambi is much bigger than Peter but only 5 weeks older so he will be doing a lot of growing in the next short while. Breeding will commence May 16, 2022. We have an order in for another doe and that litter will be ready in spring.

Our rabbitry buck arrives

We went to pick up our rabbitry buck to bring him home. His first girlfriend won't arrive for a few days yet. We have the buck cage about 2 inches from the closest doe cage because as they say 'breed like rabbits'.... they will actually breed through the cage walls - if they are close enough and we want to control that so we don't end up with kits (baby rabbits) in freezing temps, as they may not survive that.

Brad named him Blackie (eyeroll)

Peek a boo

3 hung cages, each 2' deep, 3' long and 18" high

I ordered 3 cages. We plan to keep 2 does and 1 buck as our breeders.  The 2nd doe will arrive in spring. There is room for another 4-6 cages, if we needed to increase our numbers. I have since given him straw to bed down in for warmth if he needs it.

Underneath the cages we have a 2 ft poop/urine catcher which is working really well. We hung a tarp behind the cages and along the floor to protect the walls and floor from the strong rabbit urine as well. 

There is a poop scooper so that we can scoop it into the feed bags to allow for drying to use in the spring garden. Eventually, I want to create a sloped poop slide to guide the poop into a container rather than scooping it but this will work until we can build that in warmer weather, with the rabbits outside away from the noise - we just ran out of time before pick up day.