Updated Bunny Pictures

I just wanted to give everyone a peek into the rabbitry. We hope you all have a great New Years and I'm looking  forward to new farm adventures in 2015. XO Blue Skies!

A Bloody Bunny in My Pocket

Now that the Yuletide holidays are over, I can finally get back to the tale of 3 bunnies I wasn’t sure I knew what I was going to do with.

After their first disastrous litters and me feeling generally like a horrible human and general failure, I ordered 3 very nice cages online. By the time they were shipped to me, my husband very kindly put up my small hoophouse and I had decided to keep them in there for the winter. For the most part, rabbits do very nicely outdoors in the winter but the critical part is to keep them dry and draft free. I figured the hoophouse was a pretty good option for those winter requirements.

To be clear, I don’t have a full size hoophouse in my city lot. It’s just a 5 x 10 raised bed that my husband screwed a PVC tubing skeleton to. It’s basically a spine with ribs arrangement that we cover with plastic and tack down at the bottom for season extension.

The real stroke of genius about putting the bunnies in here was altering the cages after they came to pull out their included manure tray. This allowed the bunny waste to fall down to the floor of the hoophouse, exactly where I would have had to shovel it anyway as fertilizer in the spring. I’ve always loved the way pasture stackers like Joel Saladin consider not just where they want the animals, but where they want the manure and how to get it there without work, and it was gratifying to put this into action.

Knowing that my lady bunnies were likely going to have their babies in the next few days, all the information I gathered said that it was time to add a nest box and fill it with cozy hay for them. It had also been much colder here than it usually is in November.

So the night I bought them, I went out to the hoophouse to get everything all set up. Clara, my more docile bunny, was farthest back in the enclosure and I dragged the nest boxes and straw back there to get started on hers first. Based on what I had read, if I put the nest box in there, she would explore it, line it with her soft fur pulled from her belly, and birth her kits warm and soft in about 4 more days. Plenty of time according to everything I had read. Bunnies gestate 30-31 days.

I opened Clara’s cage top that 20 degree November night to put in the nest box and she never hopped or moved. Instead, she grunted and a hairless, bloody baby bunny was born. Oh shit! Only 26 days!

I had my husband’s light coat on for evening chores and it was a good thing because the baby would have died of exposure in just a few minutes.  I picked the wiggling little thing up and put him in my coat pocket…and zipped it closed. You’d be surprised how much it was squirming around 1 minute after birth! I also had read that domesticated rabbit mamas rarely rejected a baby due to human scent, especially if it was the scent of their regular caretaker. Phew, one less thing to worry about.

Long story short, after a quick discussion with my husband, we decided to bring both momma bunnies in their cages down into our unfinished basement while they had their babies. It was the only way I could be sure I could help them if needed and that they would be warm enough while I waited for nature to kick in and motivate them to care for their babies. I carefully got them settled and put the cozy baby back in the nest box with Clara.

In the meantime, she had 1 more baby, sadly stillborn. I quickly did some online reading and most information said she would be all done or the babies would be dead if there was a long pause between births. Shit again. There was more blood in the bottom of her cage than I thought there would be and she still wasn’t making a nest for the baby recently freed from my pocket. I decided to collect some wool roving I had for knitting and fluff it around the baby to keep it warm and hope for the best. By this time it was 11 PM. I waiting another 30 minutes with no more babies and no change in her ignoring the sole survivor in the fluffy nest I made for it. I went to bed worried and sad, not sure if she would care for the baby or if she was even going to live. 

This seems like a good time to talk about the whole concept of eating animals, raising the ones you are going to eat yourself, and why caring for them does not preclude a thoughtful person from eating them. I’ll illustrate some of my thoughts with a recent conversation I had with a vegetarian friend. She is a thoughtful person and a good friend of mine, but perhaps not without her own ideas about why what I was doing didn’t make sense to her. Basically, she had a hard time listening to me talking about my care of the rabbits without challenging me about later eating of them. I know there are lots of people who feel this way and I completely understand.

 I don’t profess to know how this is all going to turn out, or even what I will and will not be able to do with regards to dispatching, butchering, and consuming the bunnies. I might not be able to kill them, clean them and then eat them, and I know even if I can do this list of things that I believe to be important life skills, I will not do it without some sadness and maybe other feelings I can’t foresee right now.

What I do know, without a shadow of a doubt, is that a thoughtful person can care deeply for the raising and care of an animal, can be fully invested and responsible for any outcomes, and still be satisfied with eating them. It is possible to have a marriage between those things and they don’t have to be mutually exclusive. It’s not to say that all of those feelings will rest easy all the time together. The older I get, the more I believe that it’s part of Life’s point to have things rub against each other; to be uneasy sometimes and further, that these are the things we shouldn’t shy away from if we can help it. They deserve some exploration. That is the belief that I am operating under. I hope it proves to be true.

I woke up in the morning and went immediately down to the basement. It was dark and I was glad I had brought a flashlight. When I hunkered down and shined it in Clara’s cage, her bright pink eyes shined back at me from her corner where she was calmly cleaning her feet. In her nest box were a half dozen squirming babies, carefully covered in the fur she had plucked from her belly. They were hairless, pink, and lovely, at least to me.

Our Urban Experiment Continues

I'm guessing I haven't mentioned that we are knee deep in an experiment in urban animal husbandry. Last July I got another crazy idea.

To begin, we've had trouble affording the kind of grass fed meat I would prefer. Not just for health reasons, but also to continue to support the kind of ethical farming I feel so strongly about. If we all are voting with our dollars, it upset me to put back the free range chicken and buy the factory raised because I just couldn't spend 20$ on it. So with that simmering in the back of my mind, I came across an article in Urban Farm magazine about raising meat rabbits. One thing led to another and I came to the place I do so often; if other people can do it, why not me? So I did some looking and found a man raising New Zealand rabbits not far from us and off we went to pick them out.

I chose 2 does and a buck, a little hesitant still, but the seller assured me that if I didn't like it or it turned out to be more trouble than it was worth, I could just butcher all of them and my problems would be over. Hmmm...you can see why I might still be hesitant. Having never butchered an animal in my life, much less dispatching them myself, I did have some concerns. But, what one person can do, blah blah. My lovely husband took this all very much in stride, built me a large rabbit hutch without ever cracking a book about what they actually needed in terms of housing, and off we went. If you don't know us in life, we're well suited to each other in this regard. We just march ahead after varying amounts of research, safe in the knowledge that we've done other things similar so this will likely be fine.

They grew up as animals do, and by the time fall rolled around, they were full grown meat rabbits, weighing in the ballpark of 8 or 10 pounds and getting pretty irritated with each other about being all together. The females, or does, like deer, will not tolerate each other or their ardent male when they are fully grown, and will actually harm or kill each other.

The other thing that surprised me was that they are fairly destructive about moving things around in their cage. When it got cold, I rustled up these square kitty litter buckets and put them in there with the idea that they might like to sleep in them. Instead they usually flipped them over or sat on the top of it. When I tried to make it cozier in there by putting some straw in the bucket, they promptly made that their outhouse. Perhaps that's the reason why people like them as house pets; they are rather fastidious and prefer to make a single spot their potty corner. Clearly the folks who manufacture and sell the bedding in the pet stores meant for rabbits don't understand said bunnies are only looking for a spot to pee in.

Regardless, I learned my lesson and started zip tying everything down. My other concern by this time was that they were going to have babies when they were all still together. So we got them separated after some trial and error about how to do that. Having said that, it was a day late and dollar short because both of them had their first small litters on the bottoms of their cages without building any kind of nest for them. By this time, it was getting cold and all the babies died.

It goes without saying that I felt pretty crappy about my skills as a farmer by this time and by default, as a person. My husband and I got into an argument about spending time on their care and it struck me that maybe my husband wasn't as into this as I thought. I'm sure some of you are shaking your heads at my ignorance, but the truth is, being a farmer, vegetables or animals, gives me such a deep feeling of contentment, that is simply didn't occur to me that my long suffering partner might not care for this in the same way I did.

After some heated debate and an hour or so apart, I realized that this was my problem to deal with. I decided that I had bit off more than I could chew and that it was time to just butcher the bunnies and end the project. I laid awake most of that night trying to decide how best to dispatch the rabbits. Having never done that, it was important that I did it quickly and humanely. A bop on the head? Sudden jerk of the neck? I just didn't know which would be the best and spent a very anxious night. The next morning I called my dad, him having grown up on a farm, and asked for his help. I told him the situation and he said I could bring them out the following weekend, as he lives about 90 minutes from us, and he would help me.

The next weekend I put them all in a cage together, got the car and kids ready to go, and loaded them up to take them out to my dad's. I noted that my happy buck, Doug the Bunny, was fervently 'loving' his lady bunnies, but since we were going to butcher them anyway, it hardly mattered. But we hit a roadblock when I called my dad. He said he had hurt his leg and that he wouldn't be up to butchering help today. Well, crap.

I resolved the issue in part that night by ordering proper cages for them at a reasonable price with free 2nd day shipping. Internet shopping to the rescue! I still wasn't sure I was going to keep them, but I knew they couldn't be kept the way we had been. Housing them in a more convenient way was at least a temporary option and solved a couple of weather related issues as well because we had winter coming and the bunnies needed a dry place to live out of the wind.

So they stayed and I'll continue the update soon in my next post, "A Bloody Bunny in My Pocket."

Back to Blogging

Hello All,

OK, I’m back to blogging. What can I say? I had another kid and it’s taken me 3 whole years to feel  like I can commit to telling about all my urban farm misadventures. I have given up farming full-time and gone back to a real job for now, but I hope sometime in the future I’ll be able to live the farm-dream again. In the meantime, I’m gaining skills and setting financial things to rights and our kids are getting bigger and more independent. Keep your fingers crossed for us and I’ll continue to post about some of the things we try and adventures we have. 

Blue Skies,
Ellen and Family

A push for fruit trees

When I first started talking about planting fruit trees, almost everyone I mentioned it to wanted to make very sure I understood that I wouldn’t be getting any fruit for a long time. What does that mean, a long time? A couple years? Ten years? And more to the point, if it was in that 2-10 year window, I just kept mentally shrugging my shoulders when well-meaning people would tell me this thinking, “Well, I just had a baby and we owe a bundle of money to the mortgage company for this house so, we’re not exactly going anywhere.”

And so I carefully picked our first trees, nervous and excited, thinking about root balls, graft unions and last frost dates.  My game and hard-working husband dug out the grass across a 10 foot wide strip in the front of our yard up against the chain link fence that separates us from the sidewalk. One of the reasons why I love him is for his calm conviction that I can do anything. When I told him I wanted to plant fruit trees, he said where do you want them? When I told him I wanted chickens, he said ok, let’s look for a coop. And when I told him that it was silly to just dig up a small part of the front yard and that we should just rototill the whole thing, he said, "Good idea, it will save me from mowing around things." Bless his heart, if he has doubts he checks them and shows up with his shovel and I love that.

In a tall, triangle shaped cardboard box came my first fruit trees: two apples, two sweet cherries and a peach. They come bare-root, which is darn unnerving at first. Imagine a 4-6 foot long sapling, devoid of any leaves or buds whatsoever, with stubby, pre-pruned roots and straggling root hairs. They can’t be exposed to sunlight, so a cloudy day is best, but if it is sunny, the roots have to remain covered right up until the hole is dug and the pile of dirt waits close by to fill the hole back up and cover them up. A wet towel is a good cover while the digging is happening and it’s always best to decide BEFORE you get the trees where you are going to put them. Local nurseries will have trees in large pots, true, but they can’t beat the selection offered by bareroot shipping from places like Stark or Raintree.

So we, and by we I mean my husband, got the holes dug and I carefully put the tree in the hole. Eric backfilled the dirt while I held the tree at the proper height and fretted. Over what, you might ask, besides the fact that it very much appears that a dead stick is being planted. It’s very important that trees are not planted too far below or above where they are meant to be. There will be some vague indications on the trunk of where the dirt-line is, not because there is still dirt clinging, but because the bark looks slightly different on the part that’s been above ground and the part that’s meant to be below ground. 

A word about grafting--Adding to the newbie-orchardist confusion is that almost all the fruit trees you buy will have already been grafted. This means that two different kinds of trees with two different genetic growth directives are spliced together to create something that will have characteristics of both plants. Most applicable to the orchardist, fruit trees with the fruit we want are almost always grafted to a root stock that will direct the tree to grow shorter that it would otherwise grow, hence the term dwarf or semi-dwarf tree. They might also graft for increased or decreased vigor, resistance to various diseases or even twisted or weeping branches. 

If the tree is planted so the dirt-line is above the graft point, it could encourage the tree to produce sucker-type growth of the root stocks variety, not what we want to do. So usually, the dirt-line is an inch or a couple inches below the graft point. The graft will look like a scabby or bumpy line that goes all around the tree near the bottom and it gets easy to spot the graft with a little practice. The other thing that will help get the planting depth right is to have a hose on hand to water the soil as it is replaced. The dirt will naturally settle some, and it can lower the tree with it so your tree ends up in a shallow hole. Under certain circumstances you might do this on purpose, but most of the time the tree depth should be the same as the area around it. Watering the dirt as you replace it will keep this from happening and get your tree off to a good start. Don’t compress the dirt around your tree after it is moist as this will compact the soil.

I carefully inspected them each day and my little trees grew leaves in a month or so. I watered them well and fertilized them lightly, and while they didn’t grow any new branches that first year, they grew leaves on the branches they already had, and I knew important things were happening under the surface. The next year, the peach and the cherries each got a couple blossoms and while I picked off most of them to encourage the tree to put it’s energy into growing, I did leave a couple on to ripen. 

And I guess this last part is the point I want to make. The trees were worth something to me as an investment of fruit in the future, true, but they were worth something to me from the time I planted them until the time they regularly started bearing fruit.  Some of them are starting their 5th spring post-planting and I’m very excited to see how much I get this year. Last year my one peach gave me a bushel and a half of juicy, beautiful peaches, some of which I froze and we have been enjoying this winter. Between the two cherries, I got about 12 pounds of peaches and a promise of much more to come this year.

When I look back on people telling me it was going to take a super long time to get fruit from my trees I end up having two parallel thought-lines. One is that it didn’t take forever, it took two years. The other is that I loved caring for them even before they gave fruit, just for their own sake. And it didn’t matter to me that I didn’t get the big payoff right away. Maybe it comes down to faith.

So if you want an apple or peach or cherry or whatever, do your research and get planting. Urban orchards are here to stay and I’m so happy I decided to be a part of this movement.

Get dirty & Ciao!

Recipe: What the heck is French Sorrel?

You'll likely only see it this one time because it's fairly unusual, but it is a fun thing to add a little change once in awhile. Is it a green or a spice? Frankly I'm not really sure, but it sure does have a distinctive flavor. It's very lemony, in case you haven't ever nibbled it before.


To store, put French sorrel into a sealed plastic bag and keep in the refrigerator. Sorrel does not dry well, but it can be frozen successfully. Its leaves, rich in potassium and vitamins C and A, will keep its beneficial qualities and great taste for a long time, but they are especially good when fresh.
Slivered sorrel leaves add a tangy accent to fresh salads. Add its spunky taste to scrambled eggs and

omelets. Seafood, chicken, veal, lamb, pheasant dishes welcome its bite. Hearty meat stews like its acidic contribution. Shred into soups with a tomato or fish base. Add its pizzazz to rice and lentils. Make a sorrel based sauce; drizzle over grilled, sautéed or marinated portabella mushrooms. Fold into mayonnaise and creamy sauces. Tuck a shredded leaf or two in sandwiches. Experiment with this herb in savory dishes, adding a little at a time until desired taste is reached.
Use generously when cooking sorrel as it reduces greatly in volume. Pureed sorrel wakes up cooked vegetables. Pair with asparagus, green and yellow string beans, turnips, cauliflower and summer squash. Use less lemon and vinegar in recipes when including sorrel. Do not cook in aluminum or iron pans as sorrel will develop a metallic taste. Use a stainless-steel knife for cutting. Stems are tough and should be removed.




TUNA DIP WITH HERBS AND CAPERS

two 6-ounce cans solid white tuna packed in oil, drained well
a 10 1/4-ounce package soft tofu, drained
3 spring onions, minced
1 carrot, shredded fine
2 tablespoons minced fresh parsley leaves
2 tablespoons drained capers, chopped
3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice OR leaves of sorrel
Accompaniment: crackers or assorted crudites
In a bowl stir tuna with a fork until finely flaked. In another bowl whisk tofu until smooth. Stir tofu
and remaining ingredients into tuna until combined and season with salt and pepper. Serve dip with
crackers or crudites.

Recipes for Chard, Kale & other greens

Kale


 I know kale isn’t high on everyone’s list of favorite veggies, but I really think it’s hard to find a leaf that’s so good but also good for us. It can be thick and is usually cooked, it’s packed with vitamins, minerals, and, so we read, cancer-fighting chemicals. Plus, frankly, I think is among the prettiest vegetables and it’s nice to have recipes that highlight it’s texture and shape, in addition to the beautiful chartreuse color.
I use greens quick-cooked like this in dozens of ways. Stir a few beaten eggs into a skillet of sautéed kale, and you're on your way to a delicious omelet or frittata. I sometimes chop the leaves a bit finer (pre or post sauté), and add them to all sorts of soups and curries - you get color, flavor, and a nutritious boost. Puree the sautéed greens and you can whisk or blend them into yogurt, hummus, mashed potatoes, and dips. Any ideas from your end?


Keep kale unwashed (moisture speeds its decay) in a plastic bag in the coldest section of the refrigerator, which is usually in the back.
Kale is very high in beta carotene, vitamin K, vitamin C, lutein, zeaxanthin, and reasonably rich in calcium.
Because of its high vitamin K content, patients taking anti-coagulants such as warfarin are encouraged to avoid this food since it increases the vitamin K concentration in the blood.


Kale, as with broccoli and other brassicas, contains sulforaphane (particularly when chopped or minced), a chemical believed to have potent anti-cancer properties.
Kale Soup
4 large russet potatoes, peeled and quartered
4 links hot Italian or other robust sausage
1 large onion, chopped
1 bunch kale, ribs removed, chopped
3 quarts chicken stock or
veggie stock
1/4 cup hot pepper sauce
Whenever using kale, I always remove most of the thick stalk.
I sometimes lightly steam kale and eat it with a splash of good soy sauce or balsamic vinegar.
It can also be lightly cooked and drizzled with sesame oil and toasted sesame seeds and sea salt. Chilled after cooking it makes for a zesty salad.


Garlicky Greens
1 large bunch of kale, chard, or spinach
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
fine grain sea salt

5 cloves of garlic, crushed and chopped

1/4 cup Parmesan cheese (opt)

crushed red pepper flakes

To de-stem each leaf of chard/kale, grab the main stalk in one hand and strip the leaf from the stem all the way up with the other. I then tear the big leaves into bite-sized pieces, but you can use a knife for this task if you prefer. Wash the greens in a big bowl (or sink) full of clean water, rinsing and swishing to rinse away any stubborn grit and dirt. Drain, rinse again, and set aside.

Hold off cooking the greens until just before eating. Then, in a large skillet heat the olive oil. Add a couple big pinches of salt and the greens. They should hiss and spit a bit when they hit the pan. Stir continuously until their color gets bright green, and they just barely start to collapse - two, three, maybe four minutes, depending on how hot your pan is and how much structure your greens have. Then, just thirty seconds before you anticipate pulling the skillet off of the heat, stir in the garlic. Sauté a bit, remove the pan from the heat, stir in the Parmesan, and add a big pinch of crushed red pepper flakes. Taste, add a bit of salt if needed.

Emjoy!