Ben Lynde

Hey I may be late on this, but I do think I have the easiest possible suggestion to fix this... don't wash it!

I went to a military collage where civil war wool was the required uniform - the first week or two it sucked, and the wool pants rubbed out all the hair on the side of your legs. But after that they get a nice coating of ... well body grease and become not only warmer because of that, but also lose all the itch.

The fact is that is how they used to wear them in the time of the civil war. That was part of the appeal of wool - both both animals and people. Natural body oils get infused into the fibers and turn it into a warmer, more water-wicking, and softer material. We would still "old corps press" them by putting them between our mattress and the body plank you slept on so they looked creased and new. But everyone knew after your first year not to wash them. They really don't smell until 2-3 months too. So you can get away with it for most the winter.

Hope this helps!

Hey yall,

I recently bought a bonded pair of Saxonys. They were a very happy little pair - Daphne and Mr. Fitzgerald, but Mr. Fitz got taken by a Coyote about 3 weeks ago. And we think Daphne is just now getting the picture that he's not coming back.

She is very depressed - for context these pictures were taken at feeding time when all the other ducks are flapping and quacking their way back to the coop. She just wanted to sit in the puddle and feel sad. We put her in her own crate in the coop and gave her some of her own grain, but come morning she hadn't touched it. So we brought her inside to hang out in the tub / bathroom and eat chickpeas. At first we syringed some grain-mush into her mouth to get her to eat, and now she will eat some of the chickpeas - but she is overall still very sad and does not want to play in the pool with the other ducks.

Has anybody dealt with this before and has suggestions? I heard swans mate for life, but do ducks? I am thinking about getting her a new arranged husband tomorrow cause we only had 1 drake in our small little flock - Mr. Fitz was our first male.

Any help yall can provide would be appreciated. I have never felt so bad for a duck before - it's very sad.

Okay I may be late, but I have been too excited about this idea not to bring it up... the Bunny Quad! I have had it planned out for a year + now, I just haven't taken the time to rent the trencher and implement it yet - so untested! But if you try it please let me know!

Above you will see my fine MS Word skills are work to try and depict what I have in my head for a rotational grazing solution for rabbits. Essentially it functions off of the simply geometry of a circle within a square; as in a circle within a square only touches the square at 4 points - the middle of each side. This is where you would put latches (still haven't figured out exactly which latch mechanism to use in order to "pass the gate" through) that the gates are held by.

So in doing this it separates the rabbit pen into quadrants. For example, as the top right quad is sectioned off above. This gives you a corner to put a hutch with a worm bin beneath (mine is 3' x 5' and fits in the corner). When the rabbits have eaten through any fodder planted and dug their burrows, then you move the forward most gate to the next section and latch it (cutting the space in half). Then go back, move the hutch to the next corner, and get the next gate to rotate and encourage the rabbits towards the next quad (fresh grass should help). Then latch the lagging gate to the next spot and reseed the old space.

I plan to implement it on a small scale first with 16 foot regular metal gates, then the square would need to be 32 feet total + the width of the central rotation point - which I have planned to be an old oak for the shade and because dropped leaves in the fall wont hurt the rabbits to eat. It might be scalable later, but for right now I want to start with this.

Initial concerns are
- i've got a welding project with creating that center ring that the gates will swing on.
- Not sure what the rate of rotation is yet, but having some perennials that will come back after grazing is ideal. My first though is bamboo, maybe some artichoke. Besides that it will be reseeding after each rotation.
- One more thing! I will have to dig a trench along the quad lines, where the gates will be latched on top of, to prevent the rabbits from burrowing between quads. So I plan to do like my last rabbit pen and attach chicken wire to scrap wood and bury that 2 feet, while the top end of the 2 ft tall /16 feet long stretch of chicken wire is attached to wood resting (or just buried under the surface). That will be going right up to some roots that might be an issue. I'll have to get those done before renting the trencher. Even better is I can orient the quad to line up with some big perpendicular roots!

Any thoughts?  

Hey I hope this is the place for this post, but I am looking to hire a permaculture consultant for the property I just purchased. Does anybody know of folks who are in the business of online permaculture consulting? Or even better, in person - I am in the central Virginia region.

I already have about as much information as I can gather for free to help the process (county ARCGIS maps, USGS soils report, and my own hand drawn maps of sun and such), but I seek the wisdom of an experienced permaculturist that can guide my initial investments. I would like to pay back into the community that has done so much for me (for free), and develop a working professional relationship as the property matures.

Please let me know if this is in the wrong category too - I'd like it to get as much visibility as it can.

Rebekah,

I keep my pelts for the simple reason of I don't want to waste it. So far I haven't found much use for them except for making my wife some nice soft slippers... twice (because the dog ate one - can't really blame him either since it is rabbit). They are extremely soft for those projects though - might make a blanket or something one day when I have enough of them. Just have to make sure to keep it away from the dogs.

Either way I use this tool to dispatch them quickly as I can and hang them for easy butchering: https://theoriginalhopperpopper.com/Hopper_Popper/. They are a small family business and I have bought twice from them now - highly recommend it.

I could do a quick summary of the tanning process if you're interested. I have gotten much better at it and learned a lot. It is a good skill to hone and I think the pelts look very nice up in the garage. They just felt too pretty to throw away / compost.

Let me know if you want. I'm finishing one hide today and butchering another tomorrow so I might make it into a whole thing with pictures if I have the time to string it together.

Tereza Okava wrote:Welcome, Ben.
I love your setup, I have way too many predators for that, I think (particularly with young bunnies involved), but I love the idea.
I find my rabbits love digging, whether in dirt or sand, it seems to be really enjoyable to them.
I found a sexual dimorphism only visible once the girls get their dewlaps. I've got Brazilian rabbits, and just after that the body shapes seem to shift as well- the male has a more angular head (almost ratty) and the female is more rotund. But that is from at least 1 year old, which is too late. I think C Mouse's idea of using feeding to capture the rabbits is the best, have a restricted feeding zone where you put the special treats (in the hutch with the ramp up?) and then take it from there.

I have noticed the ratty face on the males too. I didn't know only females got dewlaps though! Our first doe is just getting hers now (she was the first so she get to retire in peace).

C Mouse wrote:How are you feeding them? I feed into bowls 1-2xs a day. Because of this I get hands-on interactions with each rabbit daily (albeit mine are in cages not roaming).

We tend to throw the greens or pellets over the fence. We used to use hoppers but the squirrels kept getting into them. But this is a good idea! We can start centralizing the feeding location to one easy to reach corner and get them used to that. We also have a professional rabbit catcher (just kidding, it's a 2' by 4' tubberware) that we can drop over the desired rabbit, and have one person put some weight on the top until the other can get in the pen and scoop it up. It will at least work until they start looking for the tupperware... but it is a good idea none the less! We'll have to try it.

A chute may not be worth the effort right now though cause we're hoping to move soon. But this is a big help, thank you!

The wife and I love our little rabbitry operation. We do have a fairly high standard for their quality of life though, and one almost died of heat stroke in the hutch last summer. After trying fans and frozen Gatorade bottles (to only mild success) we started to think more along permie design principles and realized rabbits have a great defense against heat and cold already built in - tunnels! So we decided to keep the ramp down and give them full time pen access.  

So I dug 2 feet deep around the fence at the back and all the white fencing I put in for the rabbit pen. Then I stapled a 2-3' tall barrier of chicken wire to some 2x4s, stapled them to the bottom of the fence, and buried everything back down to stop them from digging out. And I buried some additional wire with 2x4s on both ends under the gate. We've had this set up for almost a year now and we are very happy with it. They lose far less of any new litter now and overall they seem much happier! It's actually really fun, cause if you don't notice that a rabbit is pregnant one day you'll just have extra mini bunnies popping out the ground like fairies! A delight we did not predict, but great all the same. Just one part is not great - catching them!

We've been able to corner a couple and get them for butchery. That's alright cause you obviously only have to get one bunny once. The part that is really annoying is sexing them - as far as I know, the only way to do this is to catch them and flip them over to check for what parts pop out. Yet this has to be done for each rabbit at least once, whether or not it's on the chopping block. And some are much harder to catch than others.

So is there anyway to tell sex externally? Certain traits or characteristics? We can kind of tell from the more aggressive behaviors, but the females will hump faces too (a fairly aggressive behavior if you ask me lol) so nothing is clear cut. Seems like maybe bigger ears or longer faces? Have any of yall found anything that can kind of tell them apart with out catching em and flipping them?

We've assessed 6-8 adult rabbits is about right carrying capacity for that area (gotta keep it looking good for the suburbs you know) and we'd like to keep 2 bucks at any given time, so we tend to cull the males out first. Especially the fighters. But I am afraid I might end up with no males... and that would bring the meat and fur supply to a quite a halt eventually.

Thanks for reading my wall of text!

I grew it last year and really enjoyed it. It seem fickle to get going, but once it is set it takes off to 7' tall or more, and is a very pretty place to watch grow.

Besides the aesthetics I would say a couple things to watch out for as it gets going:

1). It is very hungry plant, so it does best in rich soil and it will exhaust the soil after it's done for the season. Cause of this I just plant mine in old tires and it always has enough root room to reach its full potential.

2). Assuming you don't plant it too late the leaves will turn brown from the bottom up as it nears the end of the season. This is a good thing, that means they're done. So let them sit on the stem and yellow-brown out and then pick them off before they go completely flakey. They should be pretty easy to break off at this point without damaging the stem. The browning will work it's way up the stem as the season goes on.

3). Try them! Just after taking them off the stem they aren't great to smoke, but you can break off a quarter-sized bit and chew it and tell how strong it is.

4). There's a lot of techniques to cure the leaves for smoking after they're done. I would go to youtube for this one. Someone once told me you need a whole curing shed to cure tobacco right, but that's BS. A shed just helps provide some economy of scale. You can also put them up in rafters or something - idk what's best for your situation. You might have to get creative.

5). At the end of the season they will go to flower. Some people will tell you that you must cut the flowers off to better help the leaves mature. That may be true, but last year I only grew one plant so I let the flowers go to seed and I still got a good amount of the leaves to yellow. But you seem like you have a lot of them going so I would just let one go to seed - you'll still get some leaves, but the rest you might want to cut the flowers off.

6). The seeds I used last spring we're kept in good condition. In a little 1 inch wax paper envelope, then folded into aluminum foil, then in a sealed plastic sandwich baggie, then in an envelope and kept in a dark, dry, and 70 degree place. But the old seeds did not germinate this year, not one. But the ones from last falls seed pods did. So the seeds may only last for one year.

I don't remember the variety I have right now, but I am growing it again this year from last years seed pods. Luckily each flower that you let go to seed (and there may be 20-30 on the plant at the end of the season) will end up containing 500+ seeds alone.

I hope I'm not too late! I just want to throw in one more thing the wife and I love about keeping ducks as opposed to chickens - they sound like ducks! The sound is cute in all, but it is really good for hiding yard birds in the suburbs. We are technically within the city limits, so yard birds of any kind are illegal. But we also live near a lake, so the sounds of ducks are very common. A chicken would stand out, but a duck is right at home and nobody walking by thinks twice about hearing them.