This was an exciting and productive week for us. We ordered stickers for each of our vehicles with our homestead website on them. With as many miles as we drive this should be good advertising
This was an exciting and productive week for us. We ordered stickers for each of our vehicles with our homestead website on them. With as many miles as we drive this should be good advertising for us. Trying to get our name out there so that we can acquire some new customers. We also ordered shrink bags to package our meat chickens and rabbits. The bags were ordered from Texas Poultry Shrink Bags and also had them make us custom labels with our homestead name.
Rabbits:
We culled 6 of our meat rabbits this week and the shrink bags worked really well. Buyers are set for three of the rabbits. Piper (American doe) delivered 10 kits at the beginning of the week. One of the babies did not survive the first night and the other 9 are all doing well. Peter (our first American buck) was culled and his son Ed will replace him as our American buck.
Chickens:
Moved our 14 Delaware hens that we purchased from Meyer Hatchery and the three Delawares that we hatched from our own eggs into the chicken coop with our existing meat chickens (8 hens and one rooster). We have suspicions that a few of the chickens that we just moved are roosters. If they are, it will help with the rooster/hen ratio to keep us with fertile eggs. The 6 chickens that we hatched a few weeks ago have moved to our indoor brooder from the smaller tote that we were keeping them in.
Garden:
Sunflowers are blooming like crazy and the bees are loving it. Cherry tomatoes are coming in, lots of green ones to ripen yet, have been able to harvest a few red ones here and there. Beefsteak tomatoes have lots of green tomatoes on them but haven’t seen any start to change color. Harvested Peas- 3 quart size bags. Harvested 4 zucchini.
Projects:
Started our first homestead video. It will not be completed until next weekend or later. The video will be a how-to on making rabbit foot key-chains. After culling the rabbits we started a batch of rabbit feet and a batch of 9 furs (we had 3 furs left from a previous cull). This is our first attempt at tanning rabbit hides.
Bought a used cabinet to start building our own incubator. The incubator that we have right now is not very consistent with temperature or humidity. With building our own we hope to solve some of those problems and also have space to do larger batches of eggs.