Homestead Journal- 8/13/17

We received our sales direct to consumer exemption registration for processing meat rabbits and meat chickens from the Minnesota Department of Agricultural this week. Another exciting step in our journey! Although we do not have

We received our sales direct to consumer exemption registration for processing meat rabbits and meat chickens from the Minnesota Department of Agricultural this week. Another exciting step in our journey! Although we do not have news of any new rabbits or chickens to report this week, we do have a new video on our chicken tractors. If you have not seen it yet, or want to watch it again click on this link: Happy Hills Homestead Chicken Tractors

Rabbits:

This week we bred Gracie (Flemish doe) with Ed (American buck). We are hoping that the mix of the two will grow quickly to the size that we want.

Chickens:

Since moving our 14 Delaware hens in with the rest of the meat chicken flock, some of the older hens have started burying their eggs in the bedding and not laying in the boxes. Not sure yet what is causing them to do this. Incubator will be set up again in the next few days with 41 eggs from our meat chickens. The chickens that are in the chicken tractor have made it back down the field and started a new row this week.

Garden:

Harvested 17 cucumbers and they are delicious! Harvested 1 onion, it was popping out of the ground so we thought that it might be ready. After pulling it out of the ground we found out that it was just long and skinny. The onion was still fantastic to eat, just wasn’t as much as we thought we would get. I guess we need to sit a little longer on those. We have been getting tons of cherry tomatoes but they rarely make it into the house because we eat them all before we make it back inside. Harvested 4 over-sized zucchinis for the chickens and 4 normal sized zucchinis for us and to sell. We also harvested 1 pound of green beans. Beefsteak tomatoes should be ready in the up coming week. We have many that are orange and starting to turn red. The bell peppers are also starting to change color. Pumpkins are coming in! We have a few pumpkins on the vines now.

Projects:

The nesting box that we made for Gracie last week was a little to big. A new nesting box for her was made this week that is a size in between the regular size that we use and the one that we built for her last week. Along we a new nesting box for Gracie, we made 2 additional normal sized boxes.