Learning to live a permacultural life … one day at a time! … by Damon E. Farnham
As documented in the video below, I found four more baby bunnies outside the Dome 1 rabbitry this morning. Caught them and returned them to the dome.
Looks like they have been slipping out between the bottom struts of the dome, and the cinder block wall the dome rests on. Normally I fill the cinder block holes with dirt, but hadn’t filled them all back in after renovating the dome a month ago. Soooo, the little sneaks found and exploited that weakness and escaped.
Headed out to rotary plow a garden extension, and saw something out of the corner of my eye. Somehow, one of the new rabbit kits from the Dome 1 colony mysteriously ended up about 120 feet outside the dome!
In hindsight, but bun was sort of ‘damp’ head to toe, so I’m thinking somehow it got out of the dome, Hunter found it, and she carried it in her mouth to the area I was working in.
While she’s treated to rabbit “parts” when we harvest meat from the colonies … she also smart enough to know that baby bunnies, when alive, are not food, but family members to be protected.
THANK GOD the bunny is pure white and not grey, or Hooey would probably have mistaken it for a mouse and just munched it, as she’s currently dispatching about a dozen mice a day from the barn as we trap them.
Might have name this bunny ‘Lucky.’ 😉
Been an interesting morning already. 2 of 3 mice escaping Hunter’s dispatch … releasing a sick rabbit (Houdini) into the wild … and now finding a few new bunnies (kits) underground in the Dome 1 colony, which was only constituted a few weeks ago.
If you review the video from a few weeks ago when I migrated the first few does from Dome 2 to Dome 1, you’ll see that I commented on how fat the matriarch doe was … obviously about to pop with a new litter of kits.
Well … apparently she did!
2018.05.08 UPDATE: New Litter Top Side
I just went out to feed and water the two dome colonies and found the new litter in Dome 1 to be top side en masse. As always, they are just so damn cute.
I’m working pretty aggressively to combat the current disease outbreak in both domes. I’ll be monitoring these little guys daily for symptoms.
I’m still working my butt off trying to figure out why I have so many sick juvenile rabbits in both geodesic domes (colonies). It’s either Cocci or Mucous Enteritis (ME). The mortality rate has been pretty high (about 75%), so I suspect ME.
After doing some research on ME, I put the two most recent symptomatic (severe abdominal bloating, diarrhea, severe pain exhibited by teeth grinding) rabbits into a hospital cage and provided them a special diet (dark green leafy veggies, carrots, apples) and Pedialyte with a little pineapple juice.
One of the two (I call her Houdini) escaped from the hospital cage 3 times. I found her outside the hospital cage, and outside the surrounding enclosure cage, just eating grass this AM.
Soooo, I released her into the wild. She is still sick, and now at risk of falling to any of the numerous predators around here, but through her behavior, she made clear to me her desire to not be in a cage. So be it. With my blessing, she’s now free to experience whatever life has in store for her.
The other day I found a sneaky, covert, unauthorized, pirate nest of chicken eggs secreted in a compost bin adjacent to the garden pasture coop. Last night, when I went to lock up the coop, I found a hen missing. Sure enough, she was sitting on the clutch of eggs, and gave me that “piss off!” look … so I crossed my fingers and let her stay outside the coop all night.
No surprise … we heard coyotes howling around the property all night. I made the silent commitment … if she survives the night, I’ll build a night-time cover for the compost bin and let her continue brooding for the next 3 weeks, just to see if she can actually hatch a few chicks ‘au naturel.’
And check out the abject ‘stink eye‘ she gives me when I got the camera too close … basically daring me to try to pick her up off the nest. No way! I’ve seen that look before. That little dinosaur brain of hers has gone primitive!
2018.05.05 / 5:00P UPDATE …
Almost forgot! I had to sling about 600 pounds of Black Kow manure in the barn pasture then rake it in with the drag harrow. Warm and humid today, so I was hot, tired and drenched in sweat, ready to call it a day, when Hooey said “Ahem … compost nest coyote proofing … remember?” Doah!
Not the prettiest thing I’ve ever built. Ran out of metal fabric half way through and had to switch to chicken wire, but I used rough sawed cedar and color matched it to the damn compost bin … so I should at LEAST get partial credit for that!
That bird is single minded now. Mother nature at her best. I’ll be VERY curious to see what she does if/when some chicks hatch.
Over the weekend I did the ‘first pass’ to create a new SHTF “contingency garden,” but I only ran the rotary plow in one direction (E-W) which left the garden plot a little bumpy (wavey) when traversed the other direction (N-S).
So, I decided to do a second pass yesterday, using the subsoiler/ripper to make N-S oriented rips spaced about 18″ apart. Then tilled it again (N-S). And finally ran the drag harrow over it in both directions.
While running the tiller and filming it with the Mavic Pro drone, the drone’s battery dropped to a critical threshold so the drone automatically aborted the circular orbit it was flying and envoked its return-to-home (RTH) feature to go land where it took off from and shut down. However, as you’ll see below, the poor drone had to fight with attacking bees all the way back “home.” 😉
This is why we call her Peanut these days …
After mowing the ‘park’ next door, I decided to mark off a section of the park and do some soil preparation work on it so it might be used to plant a LOT of food as a contingency … should the sh*t ever actually hit the fan.
Here’s what it looked like from the air after the first step — ripping the soil down about 2 feet deep with the Mahindra and subsoiler/ripper implement.
The next pic show what it looked like after step 2, rotary plow.
Here’s another, lower altitude shot of the plow work.
And finally, here’s what it looked like after step 3 (tiller) and 4 (drag harrow/rake)
The plot is 100′ x 88′ (so 8,800 sq.ft.). I’ll probably seed it with some sort of pasture grasses mix. Maybe till it in once a year to keep the soil “garden ready.”
The soil condition was actually pretty good. Some red clay, but a bit more loamy than, say, my #$%^ barn pasture. 😉
Both of my hands are severely bruised from arm wrestling the rotary plow and tiller behind the BCS, and I was wearing thick buffalo leather gloves!
Can barely move, even after a dip in the jacuzzi. Heading to bed early. Beat.
Welp, Hooey and I drove to VA this AM to add a new 6’x8′ drag harrow (tractor implement) to the farm family.
Ran a few test runs on the perimeter path, driveway, gravel road …
… then decided to see what it could do with the barn pasture renovation project. Got half a lap around the pasture, hit the low corner, and buried the damn tractor in about 2 feet of Carolina Clay. Damn it!
I actually got the tractor out of the mud without having to winch it out with my truck, but using the pole boom to lift the drag harrow out of the mud, putting the tractor in medium gear, locking the rear trans-axle, and going max throttle. With the tires so loaded up with mud (slicks, no traction), I was pretty impressed with its ability to dig itself out of that mess.
Fired up the pressure washer to give the tractor a bath, and after about 5 minutes its engine seized. Yip … gunna be one of those days. 😉
I want/need to continue thinning the trees in our woodlot, but first I need to process the last load.
Here’s a video from this morning where I describe the permacultural aspects, goals, and steps involved in process each tree I cut down into bio mass fuel (wood chips), mulch, firewood and lump charcoal.
And, to be fair to my Caravaggi Bio 150 chipper/shredder that I was so pissed off at yesterday, when it comes to chipping trees and branches up to 4.5″ in diameter, it does indeed service that function very effectively. No complaints about its chipping capabilities.
In less than an hour, I reduced about 25 to 30 trees/branches to a large trailer full of wood chips, which I’ll now dry and pack into 50 pound feed bags for long term storage.
Tomorrow I’ll shred the bramble pile. Don’t be too surprise if I end up flaming the Caravaggi again tomorrow, because its shredding capabilities are nothing like its chipping capabilities, and the source of many frustrating historical episodes getting clogged or jammed up by seemingly small branches … and even cardboard boxes!
I’m thinking I’ll keep the chips and mulch separate, and use them for different things. The mulch (shred) will likely go into the compost piles and/or garden beds. We’ll see … TBD. 😉