#mentally ive been in and out so yknow
well lads i know it’s been a while. i don’t really have an excuse except that i’ve had a lot going on and i keep forgetting to update. i hope everyone is hanging in there today and the days that come after. go find you a soft furry animal to hug, and maybe order takeout from somewhere you like. have a hot bath with a bath bomb. but some handmade soap. idk what you guys do for self care.
anyway, let’s get into what happened in october.
so this month has been a whirlwind, for many reasons. fall came hard and fast, our first frost being on like, the 15th or something like that. and unfortunately what came with it was….a lot of dead rabbits. and also the end of our extremely loyal zucchini plant that has fed us all summer.
the last two winters i’ve spent here weren’t so dramatic. fall came in easily and the animals adjusted. this year it went from ‘hoodie and shorts’ weather to ‘the hose is frozen and i need to pull the lines’ overnight. i lost over twenty rabbits over the rest of that week from stress bloating and hypothermia. all of them were either in the nestbox still at around four weeks (they would hop out and then freeze), and six to eight weeks (just weaned, so at the lowest point in their immune systems.) a combination of inefficient windblock and overcrowding made my barn a graveyard. my friend who is boarding her rabbits on my property lost even more, due to them being either more delicate or humidity in her enclosure, we aren’t sure.
fortunately none of my keepers have succumbed. but of course there is still time. the good news is the winter rabbits adjust much better than the summer rabbits do, but i’m still keeping a hawk eye on the weather forecasts and making sure i have enough boxes (i’m even using nest boxes) to stuff full of straw for them to snuggle into if i they want/need. i’m also leaving kits with their dams much, much longer than i would otherwise just so they can share body heat.
but if course all that hay comes with a price, and the price is ‘every cage has giant poop piles in the corners and i can’t just hose them out anymore because i don’t want to freeze them to death.’ it is, also, of course, the season of ‘cecile can’t do anything anymore involving water or metal (or water AND metal) because their hands go numb within seconds and it’s painful.’ so it’s going to be a long process of getting these cages clean. but y’know, i needed something to do out there i suppose, now that i have (almost) all of the cages remade and leveled.
speaking of rabbits and winter babies, i finally got another halloween litter, this time four himi worms that i am apparently not allowed to post on tumblr because they look like certain genitalia. but i promise they are very healthy and i am very excited for these kits. hopefully i can get a buck out of it that looks nice and also won’t break his leg like the last guy did.
in mid-october i and my two AQFs made a weekend road trop down to california to transport some rabbits and also have a little campout with some of the folks from my discord channel. almost everything that could have possibly gone wrong went wrong, but we did manage to snag a really nice, large campsite and have a good time cooking rabbit, talking about rabbits (and dnd, and craisins, and guild wars,) and playing in the yuba river. i caught a small brown lizard (it was released), ate in-n-out, bought a collectible shot glass from weed, ca, and overall had a really good time.
as far as the other animals, we are starting to move away from ducks as a livestock animal and focus more on the muscovies, so it’s time to eat a lot of duck meat. mallard ducks (pekins, cayuga, etc) are very noisy, very messy, and don’t really do a good job of feeding themselves like the geese, turkeys, and muscovy ducks do. so, it’s time to cull. the yard will be a quieter place, that’s for sure.
coming into november the plans are…get low tunnels built for cold-weather crops, fixing up the snake food breeding system, and other indoor things like. i dunno, flooring. building a snake rack? who knows. somehow, for once in my life, i managed to get all the outdoor work done before it was too late.
