After about a year of meat rabbit keeping, we've decided to move away from this aspect of rabbit raising in favor of pursuing my real passion of fiber arts and spinning. While I really love to eat rabbit prepared in many different ways, the culling days were pretty emotionally draining for me. Then my family just wasn't interested in much of the eating part unless it was prepared in a way that required quite a lot of work on my part. The facts are that as a family we're not huge meat eaters in general. I also have been keeping a fiber herd of rabbits that I haven't been able to focus on because of the work I've been doing with the meat rabbits...either cleaning the colony, culling etc... Not that it's a huge amount of work. I have two small children and the work involved in keeping two separate herds with two pretty different sets of needs, housing and dietary, just isn't worth the little pay off we were getting. I'm sure there are plenty of other families with a different situation. In fact in an urban area if you wanted to grow your own meat, rabbit is ideal and I think the Silver Fox breed is a really great breed for pelt and meat purposes. Very calm rabbits with very good meat to bone and solid growth rate if you get rabbits from a reputable breeder.
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| Doe colony of Silver Fox |
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| Our first rabbit processed |
It's spring, finally, here in Wyoming and we're doing a little bit of revamping . Since my rabbits will be moving out of their camp trailer colony (here's a link to pictures of the process of building the colony:
Rabbit Colony from Start to Finish) I'll be moving the waterfowl into their space. I will have two flocks, a flock of Muscovy ducks we will use for meat and pest control and a flock of Welsh Harlequin ducks for egg laying. My Cayuga flock with the Rouen and Pekin will probably be for sale later this summer. I also picked up a pair of Buff Geese that I'm really excited to have around to sound the alarm if there's anything amiss around the place.
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| The flock of sheep mine will come from |
The most exciting bit of goings on around here this spring is that we'll be picking up a pair of CVM x Merino lambs as soon as the last duck has moved out of the duck house. The sheep will be living in the duck house with the geese. I've spun from this local flock so I'm super excited to be getting these guys. I think this is a ewe and a wether and both were bottle babies so should be very sweet to handle. If it pans out we may expand our flock into more sheep and lambing our own addition or for sales. I will probably blog about how we came to the decision to purchase these two sheep from this particular breeder. A bit about the breeds as well.
Spring is always such an exciting time on a "farm". New babies and plans as well as work going in to cleaning up the mess that winter left. We might even manage to get a garden going this spring. I have a shoulder injury though that may make tilling up a plot for a garden difficult at best. Building projects for a garage are on the horizon and that building will include a fiber room for me to process wool in. I'm very excited for things to come. Look forward to more regular postings from me as well. Last year was a little rough for us so I wasn't able to keep up on the blogging as often as I'd have liked to.
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| My daughter with one of our new Welsh Harlequin hatchlings |
It's spring, finally, here in Wyoming and we're doing a little bit of revamping . Since my rabbits will be moving out of their camp trailer colony (here's a link to pictures of the process of building the colony:Rabbit Colony from Start to Finish) I'll be moving the waterfowl into their space. I will have two flocks, a flock of Muscovy ducks we will use for meat and pest control and a flock of Welsh Harlequin ducks for egg laying. My Cayuga flock with the Rouen and Pekin will probably be for sale later this summer. I also picked up a pair of Buff Geese that I'm really excited to have around to sound the alarm if there's anything amiss around the place.
