Although it may be a very uninteresting title, it’s not an uninteresting food. I’ll be honest. The garden is in that stage right now where the only thing I’m harvesting is lettuce. Everyone knows how boring lettuce is. It’s just something for ranch, chicken, cheese, and croutons to stick to so you feel like you ate something healthy.
The one thing that I have picked (prematurely) is beets. They were very small, but Kristi was very excited and yanked one out of the ground to eat.
There a few cool things about beets.
They taste like dirt. I just think it’s great that they don’t masquerade as anything but a vegetable that grows in dirt.
You can put them in flipping anything. You can boil them and eat them like a potato. You can put them in salads (after the ranch but before the cheese), you can cut them up and eat them raw. When we picked ours, I threw it in a fruit smoothie. Greens and all. It was great and it made my smoothie purple. So that’s cool.
They’re easy to grow. We planted ours in early spring and have done noting to them but some minor weeding. Kristi thinned them out once and planted the ones she plucked…which added about 10 feet to our row of beets.
Versatile and dirt flavored. That’s what I’m talking about.
As always, start small, think big, and stay healthy!
This is a question I get so often that I decided to dedicate a post to it. “What happens to their little legs when you move the rabbit tractors around?” Well…not what I assumed would happen.
I wish that my entire life was on video so that you could see the ridiculous events that unfold around me. Just last week I feel off of my A-frame ladder onto my extension ladder from my roof swatting at a wasp…all the while being yelled at by my wife from the kitchen window because of my lack of safety. Just a quick snapshot of my life for you.
Back to topic. So there I was, trying to answer this question. I thought “I’ll lift the tractor up higher so that I can see the rabbits better and keeps their legs above the ground. Don’t. Just…stop it.
Have you ever seen a mouse squeeze through a tiny spot while you stood there in amazement and stupification? Me too, but with a rabbit. So now I’m holding up a rabbit tractor with one hand above my head while crouching on the ground and trying to grab an escaped bunny with the other. Lucky for me, Kristi was outside. She ran over to catch it and the little bugger moused back IN to the tractor.
Oy.
So to answer your question, don’t worry about their little bunny legs. Just drag the dang thing slowly and they will be fine. Whatever you don’t, don’t pick it up high enough for an escape. You will regret it.
Side note: don’t swat at wasps while leaning over a poorly balanced ladder.
As always, start small, think big, and stay healthy!
“I love the smell of fresh tilled dirt in the morning. Smells like…sustainability.” -Me, copying Apocalypse Now
We planted our carrots and beets in our backyard garden sometime in March and they are going crazy!
This is actually something that we learned this year on our homestead. We live in Michigan, and this year in March it was still getting into the high teens and low twenties at night with temperatures barely over 40 on average during the day. We have never planted anything before Memorial Day weekend to be honest with you. This is really the first backyard garden that I’ve started to get outside my norm and plant new things. I usually stick to the zucchini, tomato, peppers, and a few cukes if I’m feeling saucy. This is the first year I’ve played around with root vegetables, all in an attempt to be more sustainable every day.
As soon as the soil temperature picked up above freezing, they all shot up like crazy. So much that I’m actually worried that I messed up and it’s all too good to be true. For real, they look like I started them in a greenhouse.
How do i prep for a garden upgrade?
The point is, if you’re starting to venture outside of your normal tomato and green pepper plants and into a wider variety backyard garden, look into the seeds you’re planting. Heck, they usually have directions right on the packages. Figure out what you want in your garden for NEXT year and plan accordingly. Different plants need to be started/ planted in the garden at different times during different seasons and temperatures. They also require different soil moistures and sunlight. What we have been learning is to find someone who plants in our state and listen to some of their advice. If you’re in Michigan, my wife loves MIgardener. She even ordered the seeds for our backyard garden from them this year.
Where do i find a know-it-all?
Michigan is not the only state with a professional like MIgardener. The internet is chocked full of people much smarter than I am about this stuff who you could probably hit with a rock they are so close to you. YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook all have groups if you can’t find a singular entity with all of the knowledge. I’m actually part of a homesteading group on Facebook. I don’t glean much from the mindless posts, but if I ask a question, I can usually take a “majority rules” approach to the answers I get and figure the rest out on my own.
So here’s your takeaway:
Plan your backyard garden a year ahead
Read up on your seeds
Read up on your climate
Find a professional in your area
Plant Your backyard garden!
As always, start small, think big, and be healthy!
I was mowing my lawn yesterday and had a bit of a light bulb moment. The rabbit I have in the pasture tractor hardly eats any pellets. I move him every day and he eats the grass down to nothing wherever he is….so why couldn’t I use the piles of cut grass in my yard? I took a handful out and the two rabbits I have in hanging cages went crazy for it.
Here at That Homestead, we’re always trying to find ways to spend less money. If i feed grass to my breeders, I will have about 7 months of free food per year. I free feed my rabbits, so that adds up fast depending on how many breeding rabbits you have at once.
Along with feeding fresh grass through the summer, I’ve been looking into drying the grass clippings like hay and feeding it through the winter. From what I can tell it has the same fiber that hay does. The nice thing about the pellets is that they still get all of the nutrients that they might lack from eating just dry grass.
There are many ways to start your seeds before planting season, but here is one that we have found helpful. You can start your seeds in eggshells in 4 easy steps.
Eat eggs (preferably from your own chickens)
Save the eggshells and cartons
Add soil and seed.
Just add water!
It really is that easy. When we eat our eggs, we don’t wash them or anything. Just put the two halves inside each other, back into the hole in the egg carton that you pulled them from, back in the fridge with your uneaten eggs. We eat a lot of eggs around here, so we start saving shells 2-3 weeks before we want to plant (depending on how many seedlings we’re starting). The ones we don’t save go to the compost pile.
Sadly, I don’t have established compost yet, so we buy potting soil. It’s whatever. BUT we put a rabbit pellet in every eggshell with our seeds. Rabbit manure only needs to dry for a week or so and it can be put directly into soil.
We use our rabbit tractors to give our plants some sun in the early spring.
After that, water like you would any other seedling and bada bing, bada boom. You nailed it.
The one thing we are going to try next year (if the greenhouse isn’t built yet) is to buy some of those plastic lids that you would put on aluminum trays and cover the cartons like a mini greenhouse. Right now we carry them in and out everyday to get sunlight and it’s kind of a drag. The worst part is the one night your two year old has a melt down and you forget to bring them in is the one night you get frost and kill your poor little plants. That’s just no bueno.
If you have any other ways or ideas to start seeds I would love to hear them! Leave them in the comments!
Yes it’s a little odd. I know. But it’s a necessary step in producing more rabbits. Lucky for us, “breeding like rabbits” is all too true.
Step 1: Always take the female to the male. Females are more territorial, and males have less of an attention span. Sounds a little like real life for humans too. Anyway….if you take the male to the female, he will spend more time smelling around than bumping uglies. Always always always take the female to the male.
Step 2: Light a candle, put on some mood music, and watch it all unf…oh, never mind. It’s already done. It will not take much time out of your day to make sure that you get a successful breeding. When I bred mine, I watched the buck knock out two quick ones within a minute, watched for a couple of minutes, and then witnessed a third go-round. There are a lot of different ways to check for a successful breeding, but I like this hands off approach. Make sure they have three tries and you’re probably good to go.
Between 10-14 days you can palpate the females to check for pregnancy. I haven’t figured out how to do it yet, so watch all of the same YouTube videos I watched and see if you can. I waited the 29 days and woke up to exponentially more rabbits than I had the night before. Sometimes the suspense is half the fun.
The males can breed once a day successfully. I can attest since both of my does had kits and they were bred one day after the other. The only thing I noticed was that the male had a little harder time focusing on the task at hand. Maybe I’ll get him some Gatorade next time…
You can apparently re-breed the females 2-3 weeks after birth. I will keep you posted on how this plays out. I plan on breeding on week 2 to the exact day to see how it goes. I’ll be looking for ease of breeding, wellness of mama, and wellness/number of kits comparatively in the next litter.
If you have any other questions or comments please feel free!
Sorry about the video quality. YouTube channel coming soon. I will have a more involved post on building these in the future with full dimensions. Hope this is helpful!
I was worried about the poultry mesh because it’s so flimsy. It has been just over a month and it is still holding out. I don’t really believe that it will work out, but it’s pennies compared to the price of the welded wire, so I will probably stick with it.
So, this should be a relatively short post. I thought that, as it was my first step to starting my rabbitry, I should explain what I was looking for in my meat rabbits.
I did a lot of research and eventually landed on New Zealand white rabbits. Don’t ask me why the color is a thing…I don’t know. I honestly think it’s only a thing for show rabbits. Please comment if I am wrong, because I would love to know. I DO know that they come in all sorts of colors. Seems to be irrelevant, but all of the legitimate breeders seem to have whites, so that’s what I got.
As far as breeds go, I was all geeked and ready for some Flemish Giants until I did some reading. Yes they are huge. No, the turn around is not very fast. They put all of the first bit of time (and your food) into bone structure. This may be ok with you, but along with having home grown meat, I am also looking at it from a cost standpoint. Brass tax dictates that longer time from birth to table=more money. I know a lot of people breed New Zealand/ Californian crosses, but after much research on that, some people who are much smarter than I am were noticing that after only a few generations, the cross did not make any difference in the rabbit quality. That only means that they were having to re-cross their rabbits. Again, this may be fine with you if you have a lot more time than I do and are good at record keeping. At my homestead, I only have to keep track of one breed of rabbits. Obviously cross breeding throws more of a curve your way. If rabbits are your hobby, go for it. If rabbits are purely food, I say pick a breed and stick with it. I honestly did not do much more research than that on breeds because the majority of people eating their rabbits -that I found on the internet- were breeding New Zealands.
After you’re done brand shopping, you need to find a breeder. Gee whiz, I hope it’s easier for you than it was for me. Craigslist ended up being the winner for me. Once you find bunnies in your area, make sure you’re allowed to see where they live and that you get a pick of the rabbits. Anyone who won’t show you living conditions probably isn’t a trustworthy breeder. When you’re looking for breeders, make sure they are healthy. No eye or nasal discharge, no poop stuck to their fur, healthy front teeth (top overlapping the bottom, and straight). So when I got my rabbits all of this was good…but one of my females seems to have a bad case of vertigo. Terrible balance. Oddly enough, she just miscarried 6 kits. So other than the obvious, don’t take a rabbit if something seems off. It’s your money and you’re banking your breeding on it.
Short and sweet. I know that when you start looking for rabbits it may seem overwhelming. You’ll be fine. It’s really all common sense stuff out of the gate. There are sooooooo many people out there with blogs and YouTube channels, and opinions, but sometimes the majority rules. A lot of people are doing this stuff, so if it seems to be working for them, it may be a good start for you. You can always add/change/delete later. Start small, do your research, and I have faith that you will be a rockstar.
This was the first step in our homestead (not including our garden). Yes…the rabbits were names from Frozen (two and a half year old daughter). Rocky was named after a goat that my daughter fell in love with while we were watching Living Traditions Homestead on Youtube.
I started the rabbitry about a month ago and had NO IDEA what I was doing. I watched countless hours of YouTube videos before I got started and I’m still figuring out a lot as I go along. I will tell you this…It’s a good start. If you’re even a little bit handy and have/ can acquire some basic tools, you will be off and running to start raising meat rabbits.
Here’s how I started:
First, I had to find rabbits. Holy crap was this a chore. It has honestly been the hardest part so far. I literally sent 35 emails within a 15 minute break at work to different rabbitrys from different sites, I called, I texted, and I Googled and FINALLY found one that had some rabbits available. I ended up getting two females and a male because she gave them to me for $20 apiece instead of $25. This step took me about a month. We live in Michigan, so I think this might have been due to the frigid winter we had. I keep reading that the males go sterile while it is too hot or too cold. This makes sense, because every time I got ahold of someone, they didn’t have any rabbits “at this time.” What a drag…anyway…
Second, I built two rabbit tractors. I put the two females in one and the male in the other. This saved me a lot of money in buying rabbit pellets from TSC because they fill up on as much grass as they can. I put the females together because apparently the females can get very territorial. Cool beans, everyone was happy….
Third, I bred the females. This was honestly a lot easier than I expected. Always take the female to the male. The male can successfully breed once a day. Easy peasy, my girls were both knocked up.
Fourth, I started the lean-to. I had 28 ish days to get a shelter up for my breeders. I picked a good spot in the shade (rabbits don’t do well in heat), and out of the wind (rabbits are fine in the winter as long as they are dry and out of the wind). I had plenty of old treated lumber lying around and miles of tin that I bought for a song. I built mine 16×6. 16′ because that’s how long the existing shed was, and 6′ because tin is 3′ wide, so there is no waste. I should be able to fit 10 breeders in here very comfortably. It will have a cement floor for easy cleaning, because I plan on using/ selling the rabbit manure. More on rabbit manure uses in a separate post.
Fifth, I built my hanging cages. I built two for my females so far at 3′ wide, 2′ deep, and 18″ high. I’m thinking that the cages for the males will be 2’x2’x16″ so that there is no waste on my cage wire. Also, the males don’t require nesting boxes and won’t have up to 12 other bunnies in the cage with them, so they don’t need all of that real estate. If you catch on to anything around here, it may be that everything I do has some sort of electrical components holding it together. I hung my cages with EMT straps and blue #10 THHN. There are infinite ways to hang these things, but mine was free because I have this stuff everywhere.
Sixth, and finally as of this moment, was the nesting boxes. I believe I made them 8″x24″ by 10″ high. I used a bunch of scrap pine that my brother used to trim his house. I literally pulled it out of my fire pit with one of those light bulb moments. I have to keep remembering that part of homesteading is letting nothing go to waste…anyway, sorry to satellite on you there, they are not of uniform size.
This was my order of operation. It was very time crunched because after my long wait to find rabbits I kind of gave up. Naturally, when I gave up I finally got an email, ran to get three rabbits, and subsequently had no place for them to live. For this reason, I believe it to be a good order to work in, as it provides all of your parts and pieces as you will be needing them. I will eventually post more to the separate parts of this to show you in more detail how why why I built things the way that I did, but hopefully this gives you a good jumping off point. I highly recommend Living Traditions Homestead if you are going to start raising meat rabbits. She has a great video series just for you!
All of my welded wire for tractor floors and hanging cages was ordered from Far North International. They are a great company to work with and I haven’t been disappointed in any of their products yet. On top of that, they were cheaper than TSC and they shipped all of my stuff crazy fast.
