Spring Acreage Chores

This summer will be spent pounding tires, but there are so many other chores to get through:

1. Install vents in rabbitry (we're using one vent hole for the chimney tubing of the wood stove; we'd like to add two for regular air ventilation). Put controllable fans in them too so we can speed up the ventilation process when necessary.
2. Unhang all rabbit cages, redo insulation, and rehang rabbit cages. We tried to fix the insulation late last fall, but it seems we need to do a better job. Condensation is pooling in a few areas.
3. Possibly move the camper to a different spot on the property. Why? well......
4. Put up some posts and goat fencing. EEEkkk! Super excited about this! Last year we had weeds and all sorts of shrubs and grass growing like crazy. Our little push mower couldn't handle it. Tom had to buy a Scythe to deal with it (well, he didn't have to, but he had fun playing around with it). This year we're toying with the idea of getting two small (e.g. Pygmy) goats to keep everything at bay. The camper would be in the way, depending on how we do the fencing. 
5. Cob the rabbitry exterior. This can be done when we're too exhausted to pound tires.
6. Install a laundry line.
7. Install an internet pole. Right now we just have internet in the camper, and sometimes it's a little sketchy on cloudy days. It's through radio waves since we're "out in the boonies". An internet pole would mean more consistent internet.
   

   
   

So many babies! (Earthbag/conventional hybrid rabbitry update)

The rabbitry is getting up to 22 degrees Celsius on sunny days and hovering near zero at night. We plan to backburry it in the summer (2016) but until then we've stacked straw bales along the outside of the north wall. We had to put in a wood stove for cold nights to prevent the water in the automated watering system from freezing on cold nights (anything around -15 or less).

After a few baby-less months filled with false pregnancies, baby eating, and birthing outside of the baby basket, we've finally got some success. Lots of success. 

Baby basket #1---each one is a different colour! There's six all together. Hard to see them all because they were a little cold and all trying to dive deeper into their nest.

Baby basket #2---these ones are all white with some small grey/black spots.

 

This is Ditto. She had five babies but two rolled away from the group and died of cold over the first couple of days. They are born naked and the moms don't sit on them like hens do to their eggs, so they survive through insulation (straw, newspaper shredding, and fur the mom pulls out of herself) and through body warmth (they all huddle together and take turns being in the middle). In the first few days if one or two get separated from the main group of babies, they can quickly die of hypothermia unless they find their way back to the group. In this pic they're about 2 weeks old so they've got enough fur on them to stay warm (hence why they've more or less tossed all the insulation aside). Ditto is super protective of them and they are getting so much milk from her---they are huge compared to the other babies!

Baby basket #3---I am sooo hoping the orange/grey one is a girl!

Baby basket #4---Dora with her four little ones.

Thanksgiving Weekend

Thank you everyone for your support this summer on the beginning stages of our build near Rivers! Although we spent a good chunk of the summer waiting on contractors, and we got about 0.1% of the tire pounding we hoped to get done, we did accomplish a lot this year: we finished our rabbitry (place to house our rabbits), got a gravel road into our property all the way to the spot where our earthship will be, made a dugout that we plan to stock with trout fingerlings in the spring, made a flat spot for the earthship to go, bought a mobile home, made a flat gravel pad for the mobile home, put skirting up on the mobile home and put staircases at both doors, and got some initial concrete work done. Oh and pounded like 10 tires :) We're calling it for the season. We'll be spending the next few weeks winterizing things, and then we'll be back at it at full tilt in the spring! (No contractors to wait on next summer, just lots and lots and lots of tires to pound!) Hope everyone had a great long weekend :)

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I am thankful for Tom, who just finished building our rabbitry (place to house our rabbits), with all the bells and whistles (even an automated watering system!) I had the day off so I got to come out and inspect the final product. Here he is showing the bunbuns how to use the water nipples (aka having fun spraying them with water until he lowered the water pressure).

Couldn't do gravity-fed so we are using an electric pump to pump the water up to the top, and then this disk de-pressurizes the water so that the water doesn't spray at 100km/h into the bunnies' faces. Tom re-did the insulation so that there's air space below the roof, with vents, and then rigid foam. We had enough space up there that we were able to re-use the pink stuff below all that, but it does mean now the top cage is right up against the ceiling. 

The water pump.pressurizer. Some of the pink insulation that needs to be thrown out...don't mind that.

Stacking straw bales behind the rabbitry for good measure. Can't have the water freezing in the pipes.

Doe in shadow. Majestic :)

Electric & Plumbing in the Rabbitry

Tom did the electric one day and the plumbing the next. The electric is a few outlets on different breakers (so we can use multiple power tools at the same time) and a few overhead lights. The plumbing is a gravity fed watering system for the rabbits. We just need to build a small contraption to lift the water up high enough to allow gravity to do the work.

Little watering tubes for each cage.

Concrete

The concrete guys got around to doing our job earlier than expected. Yay! Had to take lots of pics as proof that everything was done to code.

"Yes yes, I like what you've done here."

Zilla was giving the concrete guys the evil eye the entire time. He was sure they were up to no good. The concrete guys told us they've never seen a dog who will stare at them even when they turn on all their loud machines. Normal dogs run for the hills as soon as they start using their equipment. But not Zilla. That pup is vigilant.

Soooo unbelievable happy this is all happening before the snow comes!! :)

More Rabbitry

Poop slopes lol. It adds to the overall height (which is bad since that means the top cages are hard to get to) but the poop will just roll down into containers that I can empty every so often. What doesn't roll can be squeegee'd. We had the same setup in the garage this past winter, and it worked great except in the garage we couldn't get in behind the cages, so some spots that were hard to get to from the front accumulated too much poop. Since there's three feet of space on each side of these cages in the new rabbitry, we'll have plenty of room.

The pieces of wood inside the cages are for the bunnies to chew on and lay on. They will be replaced periodically.

The wood is covered in two layers of plastic and it's anchored at the ends and the middle (to avoid sagging). It also sticks out 3 inches past all edges of the cages, which will help catch rogue poops so they don't go into the cages below.

I mentioned to Tom that it'd be good to get some lights and plugins in the building, and he bought all the stuff and wired it all in less than a day. I'll take a pic next time I'm out there.

Rabbitry

It's been 2 years in the making and still not quite done, but our rabbitry (which will have 27 holes when all said and done) is nearly complete. It will be interesting to track the inside temperature over the winter. So far it's almost too hot on sunny days so we might need to buy tarp and cover the windows in the summer.

Each long cage will house three individual units and there will be three long cages in each row and three rows. With poop bins under each row, and each cage being 20 inches tall, it will be about 9 feet in height all together. I'm toying with the idea of a ladder on wheels like in old school libraries in the movies. Not sure how else I'll be able to get up there and feed the top row of bunnies.

View from below. Each individual cage is 3 feet deep, 2.5 feet wide, and 20 inches tall. Lots of room! :)

Make sure the doors swing inward so if you forget to latch it, the bunnies can't get loose.