On Waiting

One thing that homesteading and farming teaches you is patience.

Nature can be helped.  Nature can be coddled and protected.  Nature can be encouraged.  Nature cannot be rushed and often follows a schedule all her own.  Rabbits are supposed gestate for twenty eight to thirty one days.  By day thirty one, you should have kits in the nest box.  Our first litter was born on day thirty two.  The second litter, that we’ve been patiently waiting for, is now entering day thirty three.  On the first litter, we were convinced that the doe wasn’t pregnant on day thirty one.  We must have been mistaken!  The books make it quite clear: thirty one is the outside range.  On the thirty second day, I almost took the nest box out.  That morning, I debated: should I leave it in?  What if she starts using it as a bathroom?  That’s not a habit I want to encourage.  Ultimately, I decided to leave it in one more day and it’s a good thing I did.

Well, fool me once little rabbits and shame on you.  I won’t be tricked this time.  No ma’am! Your nest box is staying in there until I see some kits.  I know you’re pregnant!  The irony is that this doe made a big show of wanting her nest box early.  She was desperately trying to build her nest on the cage wire using her daily hay on day twenty five.  I was convinced she was trying to tell me she was going to be early.

Living this life is a daily reminder that you can plan all you want but things will happen when they happen.  All you can do is wait.

State of the Homestead: May 2012

I’m hoping to turn this into a bit of a series.  A kind of “State of the Union,” but our homestead, which details the various projects in the planning or execution stage.

Big Momma
We’ve got a total of eleven rabbits in the barn.  Four adults of breeding age and one litter of seven rabbits that are about six weeks old.  One more litter is due any day now.  The doe was squirreling away her hay every morning and trying to build a nest on top of the wire cage so I gave her the nest box a few days early.  She obviously was getting the urge to build her nest and I felt bad that she didn’t have the materials to do it properly.  It’s fully prepped now, she reassembled the straw and piled on her fur but it’s sat empty for the last two days.  I guess she just wanted to be ready.

Three of the rabbits are New Zealand White’s and one is a Californian.  Both litters are pure New Zealand’s, we haven’t tried doing a cross yet.

Eggs & Yard

Three laying hens are settling in and already producing nicely.  These ladies, named “Larry, Curly and Moe” by my mother-in-law, are a relatively new addition.  We’re planning on letting them free range once we’re sure they know where home (and the food) is.  We get roughly three eggs a day from them already although one of the chickens isn’t laying reliably.  Some days we get three, others we get two.  Either way, it produces enough eggs for our small homestead now.

We started them off in a small outside dog kennel and after finding a good deal on a second one, we put them together to create one massive two hundred square foot chicken run.  It’s worked beautifully and keeps them quite secure during the day while they scratch and hunt for bugs.

Beans and Greens

 

The garden is a bit bipolar at the moment and we can’t seem to decide whether it’s doing well or doing poorly.  This past weekend we planted twenty-nine tomato plants, six pepper plants and a few more Calendula.  The potatoes, pole beans, kale, swiss chard, beets and radishes are all in and have sprouted.

The garden had a rough start though.  The first greens bed was mowed down by a bunch of groundhogs.  The potatoes took almost a month to show themselves.  So we initially thought the garden was a total failure but now that we’ve replanted the greens and the potatoes are up, I think we’re in better shape.  Although something is back to munch on the radish tops and the pole bean leaves.  I’ve concentrated the traps around the garden and have been popping out with the 10/22 around dusk to see if I can get the culprit but there haven’t been any sightings yet.  The season is still early so I have high hopes for the garden.

If only…

If only the vegetables in our garden were as tenacious as the maple seedlings.

gutter

 

As I was climbing into the truck yesterday morning to start my commute, I turned toward the house and saw huge swaths of green poking out from the gutters.  Walking back to the house to take a closer look, I saw it was dozens (or perhaps hundreds) of tiny maple trees.

When I got home from work last night my number one job was to haul out the ladder and clean the gutter out before those trees got any bigger or heavier.  When I got up there, the gutter was full of maple seedlings.  The gutters were cleaned out shortly after we moved in so I knew there were no leaves up there and was curious what they were growing in.  The maple seedlings filled the gutter and the bottom layer had sprouted and then rotted after being covered with several more layers.  Cannibals.  Seedlings growing in a rotting collection of their own kind.  All I could do was shake my head and wish that the vegetables in our garden would be as tough and crafty.

The Grand Tour

Before going much further, it would probably be best to start at the beginning and show you the farm pictures we took shortly after moving in.

Most of these were taken in the late December and early January.

 

Lots of raw potential.  In the next day or two, I’ll take some pictures of the current state of affairs to show how we’re using the homestead.

Urban to Rural

After spending four years in a townhouse, doing the whole urban homesteading thing, we’ve up and moved to the country where we’re raising a child, chickens, rabbits and a sizable garden.

We’ve talked about, and tried keeping, a blog several times but it always seems to fall to the wayside but over dinner the other night we realized that we wanted some written and photographic evidence of this period in our lives.  It’s already going by so fast and in a few years I think we’ll really wished we had kept some type of journal.  So here we are again, attempt four-thousand-thirty-two in keeping a blog.  Hopefully, it’ll stick and we’ll have some chronicle of our time here.

We’ve been blessed to have the opportunity to trial this lifestyle.  We had always talked and dreamed about someday moving to the country and raising a large portion of our food.  When the opportunity fell into our lap and we jumped at it.  So we’re renting an old farmstead, with access to barns and pasture and garden space.  We moved out here when my wife was seven months pregnant with our son, O.  He was born in late February and so the homestead has evolved and grown while we’ve been caring for him.

So, here we go.