Baby Bunnies

More learning experiences, courtesy of our rabbits. Our doe Trix started pulling hair last, last Thursday or Friday. We then went out of town to Salt Lake so I expected to come home to baby bunnies. Well Monday they were there. Two babies. Two is a small litter even for Harlequins, but Trix is still pretty young. The kits were just out in the yard so I put them back in the nest and tried to leave them alone as much as possible. I still would go check on them in the morning and at night to make sure they were doing ok and Trix was taking care of them. She is a great mom and they were starting to be fat and sassy. I don’t think I checked on them Friday, and yesterday morning I could not for the life of me find one of them. There was no blood or anything that would suggest it had been eaten by it’s mother (does will eat kits occasionally, but not this late after birth) or anything else. The only thing that made sense was a cat climbing the chain link, grabbing it, and climbing back out to eat it somewhere else. Since we have three and have seen at least 4 others in our yard, the cat explanation is what we went with. After we fixed up the tarp over the run and added chicken wire we figured it was case closed and problem solved. Nope. I went out this morning and thought I’d check the nest box one more time. I thought I had checked really well but a lady on a rabbit colony Facebook group I’m on said that 4 of 8 had gotten lost and buried in a nest that one of her does had made and she didn’t find them until she cleaned out the whole colony. I cleaned and I found it and I’ll not go into detail. Let’s just say I now know more about the life cycle of flies and why the nest smelled so funky. Sigh. Lesson learned.

  

  

This one is doing great. It’s eyes should open in the next few days and we should be able to tell gender soon. One cool things about rabbits is you can see their coloring right when they are born. Now it has a lot more fur than when we found it a week ago but the patterning is the same. And I thought baby goats were the cutest things on the planet.

Hateful Burning Orb

Saturday we tied the high temperature record at 117 degrees. This was after a week of temperatures above 110 and the forecast through the 4th of July is more days above 110. Neil and I were talking and we thought it interesting that in most places where people farm, winter is the difficult time. The time when you fight nature to keep your animals alive and healthy and you hunker down to wait it out. Not here. I can’t wait for October to hit. Then we enter into a season of much less work, much less stress, and much less death.

I’m not sure if this summer really has been worse than normal. I’ve lived here the majority of my life so you’d think I’d have a good grasp of what normal should look like. Or am I more aware of it because I’m pregnant, have 5 rabbits to worry about, 30 chickens to worry about, or because I’m pregnant? Anyways, here is what farm life looks like if the sun hates you.

The algae in our pool flourished, and I think my pool-keeping, husband guy underestimated the powerful combination of still water and sunlight. The filter couldn’t handle it so we drained the pool (it felt like tepid bathwater anyways) and now we just need to figure out how to get the algae sludge out of the bottom. I’m thinking bleach. If I can’t see green, it must not be there.

The whole garden just died. I started it in May when I should have started in Feburary. I’m a wiser, sadder gardener now and inspite of my black thumb, I will persevere. Big plans for a fall garden are still happening in my head as we speak.

 

Smoothie popsicles and a water table. We don’t have a pool currently, and we are already going to the lagoon tomorrow. So these guys are making due…Red Neck swimming pool revisited. I do have to say, I love that Naomi can still fit into a 5 gallon bucket, two years later. Meanwhile, Little little girl is getting her mermaid on in the bath tub. Filled with cold water I might add. Well the coldest water we can get from our tap, which is not very cold.

These are our new babies (they have been here about 2 weeks), Snap and Crackle…Guess what the buck’s name will be? They are very sweet but the heat isn’t easy on any of them. Rabbit perfect temperature is around 60. We are almost double that.

 

This is what they look like from about 6 am to 9 pm. I’m switching out the frozen water bottles every 4-6 hours and luckily we haven’t lost any. Tonight’s family activity will be heading to Home Depot for a mist system for them, because we’ve already lost 5 chickens and I can’t handle dead bunnies too…the chickens didn’t have names and most of the ones we lost were the ones hurt in the dog attacks. That makes dead chickens a bit easier to deal with. Plus I don’t deal with them…husband guy does. But the rabbits are kind of my project, so I’d be the one to deal with that. So here’s to the mist system being fantastic and solving all my bunny heat problems!

On the less dead and depressing side…my worms are doing great and I should have some killer worm dirt for my garden in the fall. Also this is the season for fruit and my family has basically lived on berries, and melons, and peaches, and all the other beautiful tree fruit we can get. I made peach jam this morning (bad for kitchen temperature, good for winter food supply) and my munchkins had UFO peaches for the first time. Little man said he couldn’t help smiling because they were so sweet. Now I’m off to take as cold a shower as my pipes will allow me and hopefully we can survive until the heat drops back into the “lower than 110” range.