Preserving vegetables from the garden was a big goal for us this year. In past couple of years, most of our vegetables went to the chickens or the compost bin. We have been freezing rhubarb,
Preserving vegetables from the garden was a big goal for us this year. In past couple of years, most of our vegetables went to the chickens or the compost bin. We have been freezing rhubarb, zucchini, cherry tomatoes, green beans, onions, and peas. Many of our cucumbers have been made into refrigerator pickles. This week we ordered a dehydrator for another form of preserving.
Rabbits:
With winter on the way and more rabbits coming every week, we needed to order more water bottles. In the winter we change our rabbits water bottles two to three times a day because they freeze with the cold weather. We take the frozen bottles to the house to thaw, so basically we need two to three bottles per rabbit cage in the winter. The Californian (Margie), that we were told was pregnant when we purchased her, was not pregnant. Since she wasn’t pregnant we bred her with Ralph (New Zealand/Flemish). Piper’s kits that are about 6 and a half weeks old weighed in at just under 3lbs this week. Gracie (Flemish) got her nesting box this week and is due on Tuesday. Roxanne’s kits opened their eyes on Thursday and came out of the nesting box Sunday. Here is a video of the little cuties roaming around the cage Roxanne’s kits .

Chickens:
Three chicks hatched from the eggs we had in the incubator and have moved into the brooder. We were hoping for a better hatch rate but 3 is better than none. New incubator has moved up on the project list. Our egg layer production has been down for the last couple of weeks and we just discovered that our coop light was not coming on when it should. We have fixed the light and are hoping that the egg production will go back up in the upcoming week. We managed to get a video of one of the chicks hatching and you can watch by following this link Chick hatching .

Garden:
Harvested 18 cucumbers, many more cherry tomatoes, 10 zucchini, 3 serranos, 3 chili de arbol, 2 jalapenos and 4 ears of corn. We had the corn with dinner one night and it was really good. This is the first year that our corn turned out!
Projects/General:
Had a group of 8 guys (family and friends) up to the homestead for an annual Canada goose hunt in our back field. There were not a ton of geese around this time but they did manage to get all of the ones that came into the field.