Gabe and I spent the day putting up fencing with a little help from the rest of the family later on in the afternoon. The fencing will be for a duck pen, and later (we hope) for dairy animals. Surprisingly, everything was much easier than I thought it would be. After last year’s Rabbit Shed Fiasco (yes, it deserves capitalization), I was expecting a more difficult time. In case you were wondering, I’ll chronicle the steps on how to build…
Today was a homesteading day. We did a lot. No, we don’t make our own cheese. No, we don’t have eggs to collect, cows or goats to milk, and gardens to harvest from. But we are doing what we can with what we have so far, and it’s satisfying in a way that would be difficult to capture into words. Producing off of your own land, out of your own home, barn or kitchen, is a joy and a blessing to…
So. The raising Cayuga ducklings in the bathroom thing? Yeah, that didn’t work out quite as well as we’d hoped. We’re still enjoying raising young ducks – just not in the bathroom. What went wrong? The first problem was the kiddie pools. Yes, you’ll find on the internet that kiddie pools work as great brooders for raising poultry. Perhaps so for chicks, definitely not for these little black ducks. By Saturday, they were climbing out of the pools with ease….
Our ducklings arrived today! After a nail biting two days in transit (my tracking from USPS refused to update after they arrived at the first post office, and I was terrified that they were actually stuck in the postal system somewhere, scared and starving) they made it to our local post office safe and sound! 31 birds were shipped to us, and only one didn’t make it. In fact, the others all arrived hale and…
This house will soon be overrun with babies. To start, our French Angora rabbit, Hester, delivered 3 kits last night. As rabbit gestation is so short, you often don’t know until delivery whether or not the animal in question is even pregnant. Yes, there are ways to guess, but nothing is certain. That being said, we never have to wonder with Hester*. She goes from being a relatively sweet and mild-tempered rabbit to Bunzilla the last week leading up to delivery. This is…