Bunnies

On March 17th we went down to the Jackson Livestock Exchange Exotic Animal and Poultry Auction. We came home with 3 Mini Lop rabbits. The 2 dark ones are does (Floppsie & Moppsie), and the white one is the buck (Peter). In the up coming months we will probably be having baby mini lops for sale. The girls were very excited with their new bunnies and keep asking to give them  carrots. I think they have watched to much Bugs Bunny.

Chicks Coming Out Our Ears!

On Saturday we received our 130 laying chicks in the mail. The mail lady called, and we ran down to pick up 2 big peeping boxes of chicks. We brought them home and dunked each chicks beak in the water. You must dip their beaks in the water so they learn how to drink and know where the water is. The brooder area has 2 heat lamps hooked up to a thermostat so that when it gets to hot in there it turns them off. Currently it stays around 90 degrees, nice and toasty. The girls were very excited with the new chicks, especially Shohannah as these were her first chicks. In about 17 weeks they will start laying eggs, they'll start out smaller sized and slowly grow to be to big for the cartons. When they first start laying we usually get quite a few double yolked. You can always tell when they have a double yolk, because they are the size of a regular egg or slightly bigger when the other are pullet sized.

Today we went to Runnings, the area farm store, and pickd up 50 broiler chicks. They will be ready for butcher in a few months. I tend to like my chickens bigger, 8-10 lbs.  One year we got behind on getting them into the butcher and they weighed around 15 lbs. They looked like turkeys. I usually end up butchering a few of them myself before I take them to the butcher. I like the butchering part, just not the nasty wet feathers smell.

Chick Prep



Today we are prepping the chick brooder area for the baby chicks that will be arriving later today. Every spring we order around 125 chicks from McMurray's Hatchery down in Iowa. They hatch them on a Fri and ship them USPS on Sat mornings. They will arrive down in Windom later this afternoon, then the post office calls an says they are there, and we go get them. The chicks are Pearl White Leghorn pullets and are wonderful layers.



Pearl White Leghorn

Stubborn Kombucha

Courtesy  of Wikipedia

For the past few months I have been brewing kombucha. The girls LOVE it, and it makes for a good substitution for pop. But I have a very stubborn Kombucha scoby, it never makes a baby like it should. Every batch of kombucha you brew is suppose to make a baby "bucha" scoby on the top covering the hole, but mine refuses to. The health benefits of drinking kombucha are amazing, as it have many vitamins and important acids. Culturesforhealth.com is where I purchase all of my fermenting and cheese making things. They have a wonderfully helpful Facebook page, and if for some unknown reason your culture doesn't culture they will even sent you a new one. So if you are intersted in making kefir, kombucha or your own cheeses i encourage you to check out Cultures for Health.