A mostly dry weekend...

We've been receiving an astounding amount of rain of late, so we made sure to take advantage of the mostly dry weekend we were graced with. Worked on the pool some more, strung support twine for the peas, did some trimming of the trees along the front of the property and around the garden, and checked the bees.

We also have a hen that has decided to be broody...extremely so! So, a friend of ours is going to be sending a dozen fertile eggs our way(since we no longer have a rooster), and we'll let her set the eggs, and see if she'll hatch them out for us!

The bees are doing amazingly well, in fact, they've filled so many of the bars that we harvested one today! The honey is light, sweet, and without the bite you find in storebought "clover" honey. Hopefully next year we'll be able to label the bars as they fill, and identify what is being harvested as those are filled. The honey is being strained as I write, and it looks like we'll be getting a pint from the bar we pulled!

And now on to the bunnies....Cocoa's litter is growing well, and are very active and interactive. Lily is due to have her litter in two weeks - we bred her to Buck a little over two weeks ago, and we should be on a nice steady rhythm of breedings from here on out. Cocoa will be bred again in two weeks(or so), around the time the current litter moves into grow out cages, which should have us seeing a litter born every month(and subsequently one going into the freezer every four weeks).

Time flies when you're...

...on vacation...or so it seems! I took last week off for Mike's birthday and our 2nd anniversary, and can't believe how fast the time went! But, we did manage to get a ton of stuff done :) The weekend before last we picked up a free load of firewood, as well as a free load of compost, got the compost spread in the garden and the tomatoes and peppers planted. We made a five gallon automatic waterer for the rabbits which turned out awesome, though I keep forgetting to take a picture of it!

We made a trip back down to Ohio Tuesday, so Mike could spend his birthday with his family, and we loaded the truck up with more stuff from the house, including the soapstone countertops from our old kitchen. The visit went well, and we had a great time playing with our niece. It was definitely a warm visit though, and we both managed to get quite the sunburns on the drive back up!

So, on to this weekend's projects! Courtesy of gift certificates to our favorite catalog, Lee Valley, from my mom and Mike's dad, we invested in a pump to clean out our pool and get it opened up, and in a scythe to allow us to hay our pasture area and put up some of our own for the winter.

So, after draining the pool(wish I had a picture of how bad it looked before the water was drained!!) You can see on the right of the ladder where I started scrubbing the liner(wow was it nasty!!).

And here's the pool after - still quite a bit to go as far as getting it cleaned, but at least I was able to make some sort of progress!!

Our "Back 40" was our other major project - it's too wet to run the lawn mower through, so we decided to invest in the scythe. As you can tell by the picture, the grass is taller than Pollux!!

It's going to take a while to get it done, but this was our progress from yesterday. It actually didn't take us too long to get this far, but scything is definitely hard work, and we have some muscles and calluses to build up. Pollux was more than happy to check out our work, and glad the grass wasn't taller than him anymore.

On to the Bunnies....

The baby rabbits are growing like the grass in the Back 40!! We're fairly certain that the fawn colored on is a girl, and we'll be adding her to our herd to keep the color going. We pulled the nesting box out when we returned from Ohio, having found that they'd abandoned it. They LOVE to bound and hop around the cage, and are speedy little things!!

Capping the Comb

Checked the hive this past weekend, and were thrilled to see that the bees are starting to cap the honey comb! The bees were amazingly calm, letting me pull out five bars before even starting to buzz at me, and still never got really agitated at us. Definitely is just too neat to see the progress they're making, and we're really looking forward to them being an integral part of our homestead.

And here's a shot of one of our homemade beesuits! I couldn't figure out what to do with the sheer fabric I wore as a shawl with my wedding, until we found ourselves in need of veils! So, we wear sweats, boots, ripstop nylon raincoats(since the bees find that stuff slippery), gloves, and the homemade veils(with ballcaps underneath to keep the fabric away from our faces. To date, they're working quite well, and saving us a ton of expense in not having to buy beesuits!

Bunnies and Bees, progress photos

Took some photos of the bunnies and the bees today, to show the progress being made on those to fronts. First, for the rabbits...our first litter is a week old today, and neither of us can believe how quickly they've grown!!

And Momma Cocoa wants to know what we did with her babies...

I don't have the photos of the bees uploaded yet - those will be in the next update!