Well this month has certainly gotten really interesting all of a sudden. The cause/catalyst would be my discovery of the local Edmonton Kijiji website. I have finally found the Flemish Giant doe rabbits plus their new litters I was looking for and got 2 of them along with a New Zealand buck to start my breeding stock out. So we acquired 17 rabbits all in one day. We were smart and also bought their hutches which made getting them home -so- much easier. The baby rabbits are at 5 weeks old now and are going to be weaned this week. We have just re-bred the does over the weekend so can expect new litters within about 32 days.
The very same day we got the rabbits being a mere week after we got the sheep, we also picked up 6 Red Sussex pullets that were about 13 or 14 weeks old so we can get eggs from them. Our truck was completely full up on that daytrip coming back and riding in it felt an awful lot like those old european farm wagons going to market you would hear stories about. Or at least I’ve heard stories about them…somewhere or other…
That being said I got lucky and found another dozen hens plus a rooster later in the week too. The 2nd batch of hens are all over a year old and creeping up to their 2nd year. So they are laying eggs now for us while we await the pullets to start laying. I haven’t yet decided how many of the 2nd batch of hens to butcher and how many to keep since I only want about a dozen birds over the winter. So, we must determine which of the older hens are the best layers and the worst goto the stew pot!
We’ve also found ourselves our first young dairy goat and will be picking her up tomorrow. It may very well be that we’ll add a 2nd one next year after we see how well we deal with the initial experience of getting the goat milk and processing it frequently into cheese, butter, buttermilk, kefir, ice cream, yogurt etc. The by-product of course will be that we’ll have goat meat yearly now from the kids in the fall.
Depending on how it goes with the sheep over the winter, we may either get a breeding pair of hair sheep or we’ll just buy weaned sheep every year and fatten them up for the fall. Piglets are in the plan for next year as well and we’ll start with just getting a couple and raising them up to butcher weight, then we can trot them across the street for a visit to their final live destination before they make it into our freezer. I got to see some full grown hogs at the place we bought our sheep from, and I hadn’t realised how large these animals grow when mature!
And then, there’s Llamas. We may be getting several llamas to add to our mixed flock of critters. the hope is that they will be good livestock guardians and keep out the coyotes. At the very least, at shearing time every spring we may get enough wool from the llamas to make some rugs for the farm. That would be pretty sweet.
This next year is going to be a whole new experience with fitting the animals into the schedule, and starting winter herbs and veggies shortly too. I hope to have ripe tomatoes by January growing in my plant room in the house. I’m determined to have some lettuces and maybe some cukes so I can have my own home-grown greek salads complete with feta cheese we’ve also made.
Definitely there’s alot of items on our list of projects we’ve now got a checkmark by vs last year when we had just moved onto the farm! Of course the list is long and will take a number of years more to accomplish. Even so, what we’ve done so far has completely changed the feel of the farm from just a place where there’s lots of ideas into a fully producing farm that is beginning to greatly improve our budget through accomplishing a much higher level of self-reliance and sustainability.
