10/26

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Been a very busy last couple of days. Besides the usual taking care of animals, greywatering the garden, washing clothes, etc, I cleaned out the coop and put in three bags of sawdust since we're presently out of cover material with the mower down. I'll add grass clippings later.

I put a hinged door in bunny's hutch between her secure 'bedroom' area and her open 'play' area. Usually a rabbit will not go to the bathroom in their bedroom area. But since where we bought her she'd always been kept in a small open cage, she sees her bedroom as a latrine and only pees and poos in there and it piles up. So I cleaned out her hutch and put a door in. I'll leave it shut for a couple of weeks while her bedroom airs. Hopefully she'll develop a new habit of going the bathroom in a corner of her large play area. Then when her bedroom's reopened she'll keep it clean. Her play area has only lath, but her bedroom is solid plywood to keep her warm. But she'll never sleep in there with it full of waste.

Bunny's also become slightly aggressive and territorial, grunting and pouncing her paws at me while I'm cleaning her cage. Rachel thinks it could be that she's reaching sexual maturity and might henceforward be 'difficult' in the hutch. The other reason for the operable door to her bedroom is to shut it when we bring her weeds so we can try handling her a little and 'gentling' her. Once we have no trouble handling her we can go back to letting down the ramp attached to her bedroom so she can run about the barn for a while. We'd done this before but she wasn't suitably domesticated and was almost impossible to catch to get her back in the hutch. Then one night she escaped from the barn and we woke to her out in the grass. Luckily we were able to herd her back to the barn and catch her later in the hutch when she was thirsty to shut her in.

This afternoon I mowed a neighbor's yard for some cash. I was hoping to get some cover material out of it also, but the yard was almost no grass and mostly leaves. I did bring back about 20 bags of leaves.

The mower's missing one set of blades till I get a chance to replace them so it doesn't cut the mulch very fine and is far more inefficient. But with the next 2 days of rain we'll get a chance to go to town and pick up more blades. There's a few areas here on the property I could still mow for cover material before winter sets in. We're trying to find some cheap rolls of old hay that we can get delivered so we never run out of mulch.

I cleaned out and organized the area under the cabin - a big job. I needed to organize all the OSB scraps by size and shape as I'm using them to plug up all the windows on the northwest side of the building till we can put in shutters next year. I've done 2 windows so far up in the loft, on the northwest side of our bedroom.

I cut a piece of cardboard to fit the inside of the window frame exactly, and push it in against the glass. I fill the frame with R 13 insulation, then screw a sheet of OSB down over the opening to seal it up. I've only got scraps of OSB left so I have to use 2 pieces for each window and will have to caulk the butt joint. It's not that cosmetically appealing, but it works and will keep us warm - those windows never get direct sunlight over the winter and just leak cold air. Next winter those windows will have closed shutters on the outside, and inside insulated curtains [we're currently buying up old pillows from the Habitat - $1 to $2 a piece - for filling for the curtains since new fill is a fortune and used comforters aren't all that cheap and most are thin and worn out] to match the look of the rest of the windows.

We've got all the laundry and tents and blankets airing put up now that they're dry. Rain is forecast for the next two days, and much cooler temperatures. Friday night could be a hard freeze.

Rachel's been baking a lot of bread in the toaster oven as the last few days have allowed the sourdough to rise. The sweet potato bread with butter and whipped honey is incredible. Tonight she baked two beautiful loaves of potato bread. Like most of our electric appliances, the oven is on its last leg and runs loudly about 100 degrees below what it should. But the cook stove has an oven, and most small appliances can go in the trash.

We're getting only 2 to 3 eggs a day from our chickens. It could be the diet, could be they're laying elsewhere, could be they're getting stolen [either a rat or a squirrel - something was bothering the birds up at the coop this evening after dark - only a rat would be about then]. The chickens love Kitty's raw chicken if given the opportunity. They have high protein needs laying nearly every day. We'll have to figure out something till we can find cheap sacks of peas.

We still haven't received our chimney yet and we've waited now a month. They'd said up to 21 business days. That's about run out. Rachel's called and been stern with them to do something and hopefully that will be productive. Otherwise after we insulate we'll have to run a space heater. It looks like we'll get another hard winter - last winter there was a whole week where it barely got over 5 degrees, and kids were out of school a month due to heavy snow.

The lettuce and young chard had some frost damage from the last cold spell. We'll cover all the plants individually in gallon milk and water jugs before tomorrow night's freeze - you just cut out the bottom of the jug and set one over a plant. We've got nearly 100 jugs piled up by the blackberry and old cucumber bed.

The arugula we planted in spring reseeded and is doing wonderfully right now - much milder than the spring plants. The radishes no matter how big they get are completely mild. That's one nice thing about the fall garden - as well as less bugs - though Rachel found a bunch of cabbage worms in one cabbage and had to pick them out with a chopstick. We have one patch of turnips so thick with emerald-green foliage they're hard to water. We're waiting for the turnips to get about baseball-sized before harvest.
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