So we had a very exciting and very productive weekend at the Taylor farm. We’ve been looking for some replacement rabbits as the Californians we started with just weren’t very friendly. The kids really want to be able to pet them and interact with them and those rabbits were just downright MEAN. In fact, the other day the meanest one (we call her Karen from all the mean Karen memes) – went and bit the crap out of Sarah while she was filling her feeder. Who does that???
Anyway so I found a lady who was looking to downsize her rabbitry, so we met up with her on Friday and picked up four new rabbits (3 does, 1 buck). The fourth one is a black & white dutch doe but she likes to hide in her little hidey hole and wouldn’t let me take a pic…
So our new acquisition put things into high gear as we had to figure out what to do with the mean rabbits. Eat them….or not? I’ve been researching for months about a colony setup for rabbits but I have a hard time wrapping my head around how it would work. We DO however want to raise our meat as ethically, humanely and naturally as possible so I figured this was the perfect opportunity to experiment with a colony setup and see if it was a feasible option. I figured if these rabbits were destined for freezer camp anyway, might was well give them a chance and see if they can survive out on the land and make us some baby rabbits to help eat up all that poison everything out there! (BTW – they LOVE all that crap – they couldn’t wait to eat it up!)
So Friday night we made due with some exercise pens and some pallets laid on top of them to keep them contained and Saturday morning we hauled them out to the land in some gray plastic totes. They were all pretty agitated by the time we let them out as it took us a bit to re-situate the electric poultry netting and set them up some shelters but they seem to really like it. There’s definitely been some scrapping between Karen and Chocolate….Karen was always the meanest rabbit at the house so we were VERY surprised to find that Chocolate was the alpha female. She let Karen know what’s up and Karen has been MUCH more docile since arriving at the land.
We set them up with gravity fed feeders and waterers as well as shelters using their gray totes. We’re hoping they can figure out the poultry nipples on the extra chicken waterer but just in case, we made a gravity fed waterer with the orange bucket and a pan.
We also rented a uhaul for the day Saturday and managed to get our 4 IBC totes hauled out to the land along with some free pallets and a big wooden pallet box we found!
We turned the pallet box into a rabbit bunker with a tarp over it and drilled some large holes in each side so the rabbits have a place to hide if predators come trolling.
We also got our girl chicks moved out to the bug shack. So that makes 50 chicks and 3 rabbits out at the land now! It’s finally starting to feel like this is really happening. Check out the latest video here!
The Taylor Family Farm 