Chickens, Bunnies, and Pigs…Oh My!!
Whoooaa baby! The house is almost done, just a few weeks away, but guys, I’m just dying to tell you all about the farm portion that’s growing by leaps and bounds!
Our oldest is getting prepared to show a rabbit at 4-H this year, and we have a fabulous friend who was raising some meat rabbits and happened to have a show rabbit as well. We are in the arduous process of building a bunny hutch to house 7 meat rabbits that will be coming to us in June as well as the show rabbit we picked up in April. Rowan has changed his name from Thistle (which I, personally, thought was a great name, hehe) to Professor Nibbles, lol. She is 6 and learning responsibility by taking care of him, and she is doing fairly well! Sometimes we have to bug her or remind her to feed/water/empty his tray, but 90% of the time she is all about keeping him happy and healthy and well taken care of.
The littles loved playing with the cages, extremely graciously loaned to us by the previous bunny owner, which helped us know we had the right size cages to pick up our next farm animal for the property! We welcomed three new piggies to our homestead this weekend, and we are absolutely smitten! Meet Huey, Duey and Luey! They are Mulefoot Hampshire crosses, and they have some amazing personalities, and we are absolutely in love with them. Huey is the lightest brown one, and a fairly quick learner as long as others show him what to do first. He likes to get a mouthful of his grain and chew it then go back for more, whereas the other two like to LIVE in their food! Like Duey, he hopped up into his food trough and decided that was where he belonged today, since it was out of the rain! But Duey has yet to learn how to get into the automatic feeder (as of Sunday evening), even though both of his brothers have figured it out…but he loves to look at us and try to make eye contact with us and turns his head when we call his name just 48 hours later! He is our mulefoot show-er with the fused toes and the chin dangles (still not sure what to call them, hubs says they’re chin testicles, and they do look like it!!). Luey is the smallest one, but also seems to be the one to use his noggin, as the first one to figure out how to use the automatic feeder. He is the black boy with the slightly longer hair, and sweet as all get out.
They are all still getting used to us and not interested at all in us being in their space, but they’ll get there. The space currently is their training pen that we built over 2 weeks (could have been done sooner if we had been able to work on on it consistently, but real life jobs and children, who are LOTS of help, hehe are always a factor, and here we are). They are also liking their shelter built out of one pallet, one makeshift pallet, and an 18 ft x 20 ft tarp, and built in one morning! That was a rush job, but works great! Soon enough they will be turned out to the area where there used to be a pond on our property and is currently a marshy mess. The goal is for them to dig it out enough for it to some day be a real life, honest to goodness pond with fish and ducks again! We will show the progress of how they do! And then they will provide us with some delicious pork and bacon in the fall, hopefully.
And finally, if you’ve been following us, you know that we already have our lovely flock of chickens that are laying our fantastic eggs! We impulsively decided to add several more chicks to our growing chicken family! We now have 2 guinea hens (for tick control, hopefully!), 3 green eggers (I think we ended up with 2 roosters and one hen, oops!), and 4 silkie bantams!
We are keeping an eye on our green egger hen, she seems to have a broken toe on her left foot, but she is a trooper and is moving around just fine! We were going to move them into the big coop from their pen inside the run last night, but we forgot to move them in the dark, so that is the goal for this evening and we’ll see how they do! So far they are chilling in their own pen while the big hens free range throughout the day.
We moved the silkies into the bigger coop and run with our bantam rooster and our brahma bantam hen. She went after them once, but they all seem to be keeping to themselves now, here’s hoping they start mingling and hanging out together soon. Silkies were a whole new experience for us since we have not had them before, but we are super excited to learn about them and watch them grow, and maybe (hopefully) hatch some of their eggs so we can have more!
Stay tuned for our animal adventures! I’m sure we’ll have many learning opportunities and and exciting summer! We’ll update more when the Goodyear house is completed, we are so close!
Matthew, Leigh Ann, Rowan, Sawyer, Micah, Kathi and Frank
