It’s shaping up to be a busy time on the farm with the arrival of spring!
We have a new litter of 9 rabbits just born last night, and I’m excited to see 6 dark-skinned babies in with the 3 light-skinned ones. We’re trying for blue fur and it looks promising so far. The white coloured doe is one of our Flemish Giant-New Zealand hybrids and we bred her to a black coloured American blue buck. If I can get a blue buck and a doe from the babies, I plan to breed the blue colour back into our flemish line. I want to get some different flemish stock to breed these babies to as their flemish grand-doe is only 10.5 lbs or so which is too small for show weight for that breed. I’m aiming to develop a few full-sized blue flemish giants as our terminal stock of that type, we’ll see how long it takes me to achieve that goal!
This week coming, we’re expecting 2 more litters of rabbits from different combinations of breeds: hybrid Flemish/NZ doe to a NZ buck, and Flemish doe to a hybrid Flemish/NZ buck. I’ll be breeding a Harlequin doe to a Flemish/NZ buck today, and another Flemish doe to NZ buck for another round of the hybrids. The Flemish/NZ hybrids grow out quite nicely and finish with about a 62% dress-out rate. Our first litter of hybrids I didn’t keep track of how long it took them to get to their butcher weights of roughly 9lbs, nor of how much food they ate to get that big. I’m sure they were slow growing as Flemish stock usually is. With our new efforts mixing in some of the faster growing breeds, I’m keeping track of weight gains and feed conversion ratios until we get the fastest growing rabbit with the best dress-out rates and really nice fur colours. The best colours, or at least our favorites, will be grown out to much larger than the usual fryers/roasters so we can get a nicer, thicker hide to tan.
Our goat kids are growing like weeds and climbing on everything they can, it’s hilarious to watch them zoom around the pasture launching themselves into the air. I’d love to get another goat doe this season so we can have up to 6-9 kids next spring. I’m sure I will have built them a goat playground by then! When someone said that keeping goats is addictive, they were -so- right. Our chickens are starting to lay more eggs now that we are getting more light, and I’ll be moving the coops outside to their spring location the first week of april. I hope they are all laying by then since I’m trying to decide which of the oldest hens to cull, and no laying eggs means into the stewpot they go!
The yard is really, and I mean Really, wet right now so rubber boots are a must while doing chores out there. I’m thinking about how we can manage the spring runoff effectively so we aren’t putting up with the standing water in inconvenient places. It should also have the benefit of moving the water out of the backyard which means I can use the backyard much sooner in the year, and not as a duck pond!
Speaking of ducks, I’m getting 4 ducks to play with in a few weeks. We’ve never tried eating duck eggs before so this should be an adventure. We’re getting Muscovies, 1 boy and 3 girls. I am hoping they also put a dent in this year’s mosquito population. We’ll also build some bat houses to help encourage the local bat population to eat the bugs too. And if we have ducks, I should spoil them silly and build them a pond…even if it is made out of a kiddie swimming pool cleverly disguised in the landscape with rocks and plants.
Fencing is pressing on my brain of late too, trying to figure out what to do first and will help the most. It makes most sense to finish the dog pen first and then fence in the back garden with 7ft fencing to keep out the goats. I don’t dare put out seeds and transplants in the garden until it’s been fenced off or between the sheep and goats there will be nothing left for us to eat. Once the garden is done, then I’ll concentrate on fort knox pens for the goats. That should make it much easier to predict when our goat does will have babies if we can pen up the boys.
Aside from livestock and fences, the garden will be a big focus this year as will some serious beginnings of our off-the-grid energy systems. We’ll start with a generator since power outages in the cold = busted well pumps due to frozen pumphouse = expensive and inconvenient to replace. Then we’ll get busy adding more insulation to the house up in the attic for better r-value and make some progress on finishing insulating the walls of the barn. I’m not sure what the percentage of completed walls in the barn is, but there are far too many un-insulated sections where previous repairs had been done and not finished. I’m going to purchase a Kill-a-watt meter sometime this spring and accurately figure out what our power consumption is. I’ve got some rough numbers and they are far too high for my liking. We’ll have some lifestyle adjustments to make to minimise power consumption in the meantime.
Well, it’s time to go make the week’s loaves of bread and snacks!
