Turkeys

The turkeys are getting big.  They're about 14-weeks old now, so they only have about 2 weeks to go until time to butcher.  Here they are foraging around the yard...

Tractor or me?

Every few weeks Dan takes a picture of my progressing big belly.  Today I asked him to take a new picture of me and he says "Only if I can take it in front of the tractor".  What?  What does the tractor have to do with pregnancy pictures?  Oh, well, I gave in.  So here is a pic of me at 32-weeks standing in front of the tractor.  I'm not exactly sure which you're supposed to be looking at though.  :)

Egg count

17 large eggs, 107 small eggs = 124

Egg count

This week: large: 27, small: 106 = 133 eggs this week!  Now if we can only get the new girls to double the size of their eggs, we'd be set!

Pigs 'n eggs

Just so you know... piggies LOVE eggs!  And I do mean LOVE!

Founds eggs

Today while getting into the bunnies food bin, something caught my eye.  A secret nest.  One of our Ameraucana's has found a private hidey hole and has been laying her eggs there.  Eight perfect little blue eggs.  So they don't go to waste, I'm going to cook them up and feed them to the pigs.  Our new piggies haven't had eggs before, so I'm looking forward to see how they react.

Negative 1

Holy cow!  Just when I thought our crazy bunny weekend was over, it just keeps getting worse.  Tonight after we got home from running errands and found our last baby bunny dead, I thought all was over.  Then, Dan went to check on all the rabbits and D4 had ANOTHER baby... 4 days after she birthed the others.  This time though, she wanted to make it abundantly clear that she doesn't want babies because this poor little thing was half cannibalized.  Dan, bless his soul, only told me about it after he disposed of the baby and didn't show me.  I don't think I could take any more bunny madness tonight. 

We've decided to stop breeding bunnies, at least for the time being.  For starters, they are a lot more work then raising chickens, turkeys and pigs.  We're also not sure how we feel about raising animals in cages without access to unlimited fresh grass.  The rest of our animals seem so happy.  The rabbits however seem, well, unhappy.  Until we can find a way to raise them in an unconfined way, we'll hold off.  If we can't do it according to our values, we won't do it at all.