A New Year a New Bunny! Welcome Bender!

The era of bunnies has now dawned at our farm and the first bunny has arrived. This new bunny is Davin's 4H project this year. I found a bunny that was free to good home, and so Bender (named by Davin after watching 2 seasons of Futurama) has moved in as of yesterday. For now, he will be an indoor bunny since it's been really cold here temps from -20C through to lower than -30C. We are building up the leanto at the back of the house and finishing its insulating and adding a partition wll and door to complete the first part of the rabbitry. We will temporarily house it in the lean-to until we build a really nice rabbit house later on. Bender is a Netherland breed of rabbit, male and un-neutered and about a year old. He was part of a rescued litter taken in after the parents were eaten by coyotes. Here are several pictures of Bender in his new hutch:





Also soon to arrive are some meat rabbits. We have finally found a couple sources for meat rabbits in Alberta and are going to ge a buck and 2 does to start with. With some good planning and a little luck, we should have a good supply of rabbit meat for our freezer later in the year. From the research I've already done, it seems that it will be about 17 weeks from a doe being bred, we could have market-sized fryers ready for the freezer. That should put our first time for butchering/processing sometime in May. That's not too bad of a time frame at all. Depending on the breed we get, we could expect an average of about 3 pounds of meat per rabbit and I'd say an average of 7 rabbit per litter, so 21 lbs of meat average per litter. With 2 does breeding, if we attained the full 5 litters per year @ 80 total kits, that would be 240 lbs of rabbit meat in a year.

On the vegetation front, I have begun compiling my list of things to grow for this season and realised today that I need to get planting into the seed trays this week for flowers and veg that need 10-12 weeks before last frost. I plan to build poly tunnels and use coldframes this season to extend our season as much as possible and hope to set my planting out date for the first week of April. For Alberta, that's early, so the polytunnel(s) are going to need to be heated. I think I'll be getting my planting gear organised tonight!