The heat of summer is upon us, we’ve had a couple of 27C days last week which is too hot for my comfort and that of our black-furred dogs. (and yesterday, torrential rain of about 3″ total, flooded us a bit, welcome to Alberta weather!) I’m very glad our barn is a much cooler and even temperature than outside when hot so we can spend much of our time in there building things while the wort of the days’ heat passes by. I ran out of lumber last thursday which was immensely frustrating as it puts a stop to my building until payday this week and slows down moving our poultry outside.
To balance that annoyance out, I discovered the ducks made a nest hidden behind an old water tank in the corner of the barn and there was 23 eggs there! Holy quackers we might get some ducklings this year yet! They had all been too busy molting out their feathers previously. I was hoping I’d get their big pen moved before they nested but it may turn out alright in the end. Amusingly enough, they are not using the nest I made them. I suppose they don’t find it ducky enough or something. I decided to guarantee us at least some hatched ducklings, and collected the eggs then delivered them to a friend in town who has a sportsman incubator and will incubate them for us.
Update on our chickens: I’m getting ready for “processing day” for all the old stock which is good since our freezer is empty and we are getting kinda hungry. That will leave us with 11 young producing hens and an older roo, 2 immature hens we are growing as replacement stock, 3 immature roos & 1 other mature roo (roos for the bbq), and 3 other mature producing hens for breeding hatching eggs. We’ve found the balance between how much stock to keep and how much to expand, and figured out the whole raising chicks process so we can now renew our own stock yearly, which will be really nice to not have to rely on a hatchery for chicks unless all our eggs fail to hatch. As of yet I don’t have an incubator, but it is on the list of things we really want to get soon. (Too bad we don’t win the lottery or something, but the recession has got things so tight to the bone we can’t even squeeze two pennies together to waste on tickets when we’d rather buy food, gas to get to work, or much needed supplies for the farm) I scored a couple brooder lights and have have built a make-shift brooder which has worked out really well for the 2 Ameraucana hen chicks I currently have in them. The little girls are putting on size fast and are getting well into their adult colouring with their feathers coming in. They will be quite nice looking birds when they grow up. I have put some hatching eggs under one of the broody hens too and isolated her in her own chicken tractor in hopes she can hatch & raise them. We’ll see how that goes, she didn’t like being confined in there too much but has settled down since her food and water are right in front of her now.
Goats: Well, the babies are getting quite big now, almost as tall as their mothers and rapidly putting on more weight. As soon as I get the time to do it, we’re having a processing day for them too. Darren will be glad to see it since they are really denting the roof of his car when they jump on top of it several times a day. Once the babies are gone, I’ll start milking the girls in earnest and canning the milk we get to save for the winter time. I do think Aega (our younger doe) looks to be pregnant again, or maybe she is just really fat I’m not sure. I thought Lisa was pregnant again, but I’m not so sure now since she has a nice trim figure. It could be we have one more round of babies this year which would be ok. Soon we will have their pens complete and their wandering around will be put to a stop. Then I can replant my berry bushes and trees they ate! I have learned the harsh lesson that having fruit trees and bushes combined with loose goats is a bad idea for having any future fruit crops at all. Billy jumped the outer fence again so earned himself some “time-out” time being tied up and manually rotated around the pasture. He hates that since he can’t follow the other goats around everywhere. You’d think he’d learn from the first time he did it, but apparently not. At least this way I can manage easily what he is eating down and he’s doing a really good job on the dandelions. We also discovered he loves banana peels and will butt the other goats out of the way to be first in line to get one!
I’m trying to decide how many more does to add to our little flock or if I should bite the bullet and get a miniature cow. On one hand the cow would produce enough milk that I could easily make cheese, yogurt and butter, plus a calf every year to be raised for beef, and on the other hand cows eat so much more than goats and they are really, really big animals – even the miniature ones. It will bear a lot more thinking about to decide if a cow is the way to go, and much more detailed study on pasture/feed requirements. Whatever way we go I don’t want to overburden our pasture causing us to run out of feed in the middle of summer!
The rabbits are all doing pretty well these days. I have observed and learned a few important things over the past couple months that have affected our bunnies ability to breed. It appears that all my bucks were so tired from going to the last rabbit show that some of them didn’t successfully breed their does. The does thought they were expecting and even pulled fur at the appropriate times, but no litters showed up for those does and on palpation they weren’t pregnant. I should’ve palpated on the 13th day or so to check but missed on my timing. We did get 2 new litters which was better than nothing but it does set back our schedule and is causing me to rearrange my breeding groups. It means when shows come up, I will think very carefully about what if any rabbits I take to a show so as not to disturb the breeding schedule too much. The travel stress on the rabbits going to and from shows really tells, and it looks like they can be thrown for a loop for a whole month to get back comfortable with normality.
Our youngest big flemish buck Dagda has successfully had his first litter! We are watching those babies excitedly to see how they develop. Right now aside from new litters showing up and needing daily monitoring, the current big focus in the rabbitry is kits at weaning time and getting weaning pens built to house them before their wean dates. I’m currently using our big 10-hole travel coop, splitting litters in half to avoid overcrowding and have all our dog crates in use as weaning cages too until I can build enough actual weaning pens. Our march babies are nearing the size where the girls will get their own cages. I need to build at least 3x 3-hole banks to house them in, and our february babies are ready for breeding in august and are looking to have grown to a nice size. I hope they turn out to be as good mothers as their older sisters. We have also acquired a new mature flemish light grey doe and a young 10 week old flemish light grey doe. With luck next month we’ll have a litter out of the older doe. She is huge at 17.4lbs btw!
I’ve been pricing out all the parts we need to get the automatic watering system for the rabbits going keeping in mind the need to account for freezing in winter as well as what we need for cage building supplies to keep up with growing our replacement stock. It puts a new perspective on growing the rabbitry when you can see the unit cost to build a single coop on new purchased materials. Depending on the variation between a doe hutch, weanling hutch, or a buck cage, it’s going to cost me between $50-$100 CDN to build each hole in the rabbitry. This is with ordering raw materials in rolls of cage wire, j & c clips, and lumber plus bits of hardware. This is the cost to get the ideal materials I want as opposed to using whatever can be gotten that might not suit the purpose.
