Tuesday, May 4, 2021: Regulating the Rabbitry and Thinking Ahead

Things are getting back to normal. It's great being home. I'm building a place here that's my favorite place on Earth, with little need or desire to leave. I feel like the desire to leave your home is an issue in modern society that costs people a lot of money and time, so in my own life I'm doing something about it.

On the trip to Kansas, dietary standards went out the window because, well, those aren't my people and it's not my place. It's a different culture and I can't take all my food with me and eat separate from everyone else. Moving forward, I'll be more cognizant of the effect this will have; I'm gonna be stopped up, sluggish, and grumpy for a couple days. But things are getting back to normal now, and I'm coming into a better mood.

Peas coming in well

I'm looking a bit more forward this week, as things are settling into the routine of post-planting spring. Spring is a time of action, a time of here and now because that's all that can be focused on as you execute what is hopefully a more refined plan than the one from the previous year. As the plan gets executed, things are learned and you can focus on refinement for the next stages: the planning and looking ahead stage that we're now coming into.

Back to school

For my application in this moment, I'm planning on overhauling the rabbit operation. I think June marks the one year anniversary of starting off with rabbits. I've been learning some things and I'm getting ready to apply them.

First off, I need two more litters, and I have two does that don't currently have a litter. They'll be bred. If they refuse to breed, they're gone. This morning when I got home, I set Blackberry and Other Mombun to breed. It seemed that OMB, the rabbit that required a lot of patience this year, was not in the mood to breed. She wasn't receptive at all. I'll breed them both again Wednesday morning and Thursday morning to make sure the deed gets done, but if they don't yield another litter, they're outta here.

Second, I have a defective buck, Chance, that I don't want to breed on account of his defect. He has one toe on both of his front feet, and his front legs are short. Probably the reason he was cast from the nesting box as a kit. He either has to go, or has to be removed physically from my rabbitry. Melissa and I are being hypervigilant of the feed bill right now, and I don't want a defective nonproductive rabbit being part of that factor.

Third, my balance is all wonky. Three bucks is far too many to work four does. And four does is not enough to produce what I need without being really hard on my animals. So I'll be cycling my animals for a more efficient breeding program. Two bucks and five does is about right I think. So I'll be saving a buck and however many does from our final litters this year, and bartering for a new buck from a separate bloodline. Buddy boy and new buddy boy are out, they're too old to keep up with my nimble young does, and they give up too easy. I need me some strong young bucks that'll get the job done.

Part of the garden that I call the piggy patch

Fourth, I need better record keeping in my rabbitry. I officially don't know who are the parents on most of our current kits. So I'll be adding a laminated chart to every cage to keep track of who is who and who's their mamma and daddy. I think there's an app to help keep up with that, so I'll be on the lookout for that.

All this is communicated to Melissa, who is all for having more organization and efficiency in a system that costs us money. I don't know though how she feels about completely replacing store bought chicken with our homegrown rabbits... We'll see.

All the rabbit thinking makes me very glad I don't have space for a pig breeding operation. The obvious goal is to streamline production of lean meat on the homestead, but doing so on a bigger scale or with bigger animals would be a real pain.

Part of the springtime shift is also shifting to harvest mode. It's not yet time to harvest anything, but being in a mindset to think ahead is good. I'm on the lookout for baskets and such that the kids can use for gathering tomatoes and green beans, I'm on the lookout for jars and baggies for preserving things, and I'm about to start up the freezer to see how it works so it'll be cold when we harvest these fifty some-odd rabbits. Two new litters from Blackberry and OMB should bring our 32 bunnies up near 50. A strong finish for the end of the season, providing a rabbit a week for the following year. I'd like to bump that up to a rotation of 2-4 a week for a year. The current living 32 animals will probably yield enough to get us that level through the off season. With proper management and a willing hand in the kitchen from Melissa, that'll be no issue sustaining it. We'll establish that in a few months when it cools down enough to run the girls again.

Other than that bit of forward thinking, I'm going to be putting a few more squash seeds out for winter squash and the summer squash that didn't germinate, along with a handful more tomato plants. We don't have the infrastructure for the whole thirty plants we envisioned, so I think we'll just do twenty. That's a lot of tomatoes by my reckoning, plenty to see how we can manage them. This fall when people give up and toss their tomato cages, we'll pick em up cheap and improve our capacity for next year. Thinking ahead, or anyways trying to.

The gaarden is doing well of course. I've spotted a few bean sprouts that the chickens didn't get to. I'll be planting more soon, and planting them closer to the tomato cages so the birds will be less apt to get at them. While Melissa would be content not to have chickens, I do enjoy having them here more than anything else. Even if they never later eggs, I'd still have chickens for their aesthetic and their bug eating. Except when I'm mad at them for eating all my sprouting plants. Not much is more frustrating to me than that, and the way I garden there's not much to do for it. So I guess something's gotta give then.

Eleven hundred words is a heck of a daily post, so I'm going to stop rambling and call it a day. I'm back to podcasts, so I'm gonna go listen to some. More on that later.

Love from Texas

Nate