Homestead Journal 11/5/17

We had a busy week filled with small projects and lots of planning. Rabbits: Weighed and moved Margie’s 6 kits to their grow out cage. Weighed our 11 week old rabbits from Rachel’s litter. They

We had a busy week filled with small projects and lots of planning.

Rabbits:

Weighed and moved Margie’s 6 kits to their grow out cage. Weighed our 11 week old rabbits from Rachel’s litter. They will be our next rabbits that we process. These ones should be ready for processing next weekend.

Chickens:

After the mustard eggs failed us last week we think that the egg eating problem is resolved. We will still keep an eye on them but have been getting about 7 eggs a day from that side now when we were only getting 1 or 2 before.

Garden:

Have been doing research on micro greens to grow indoors this winter. We have not ordered any seeds yet but plan to order some soon and get those going.

Projects/General:

Finished 11 rabbit furs. Three are available for purchase and the others we will use for projects (hats/mittens/scarves).

Finished furs

Started another batch of 8 furs and am hoping that they will all be sale able quality. Opened an Etsy Store to sell the rabbit foot key chains that we make. The deer hide that we have been working on came out of its last soak and is drying. The hide seems to smell a little bit so it may not turn out. I will wait until it is dried and the leather is broken to determine if it is worth keeping.

We made rabbit pot pies and will be writing up a recipe for it soon.

Rabbit pot pies
Rabbit pot pies

Brian built 4 water bottle boxes so that we can carry all of the water bottles down to the barn easier. Each box fits 6 water bottles. Once it is below freezing we will need to change the rabbits water bottles 2 to 3 times each day.

water bottle box

We did some work on shelter boxes. We modified Gracie’s old nesting box into a shelter box and then we made 4 new shelter boxes for the other does. We would like to have a nesting box and shelter box for each doe. To get to that goal we only need one more shelter box and 3 nesting boxes.

Shelter boxes

Our house is an older house, built in 1925. We have been slowly working at remodeling the interior of the house. Last fall we had two new windows installed in the office and this week we had two new windows installed in the living room.

New windows this week.

The living room and the office are open to each other so we figured we would do both rooms at the same time. Our plan is to gut those two rooms down to the studs and add new insulation, drywall and trim. Both rooms have hardwood floors that we would like to refinish. The condition of the floors is unknown because there is carpet covering it currently. This project started last fall when we decided to see what was under the wood paneling walls and drop ceilings. When we removed the wood paneling we uncovered some very interesting wall paper and we have been living with that wall paper for a year now.

Floral orange and yellow wall paper that was under the wood paneling.

We also discovered that there was not very much insulation in the walls so we wanted to make sure that we got those walls insulated well. This week we ordered most of the supplies to get this project started. With winter almost here and a few months of not much garden work to do, the timing seemed right to start this project up again.

It is that time of year where are in between cart season and sled season. This week we took the sled out of storage and started using it. Later that same day we needed to use the cart because the snow had already melted.

Cart and sled season