Standard Rex Bunnies at 3 Weeks

Posted on November 15, 2015 by onedogrunning

These bunnies are just about three weeks old now, and very cute. They’re starting to nibble on hay and are adept at jumping out of the nestbox to pester their mothers.

Ironically it seems that my opal doe gave me blues and my blue doe gave me opals.

You can see in the above photo two solid opal kits as well as a broken blue. The opals have the tan undercoat that peeks through the blue while the broken blue does not. There are also two black otter kits, a broken castor and a broken opal pictured above. These are Bluefin’s babies.

This is Opal’s litter. The solid castor kit seems to be a doe, which basically means I have to keep her. The Rex castor coat is just to die for. Also pictured are two broken blues, two broken black otters and a broken castor. Such cute!

Yacon for Rabbits

Posted on November 15, 2015 by onedogrunning

Last year I bought a small yacon plant, which is an edible Peruvian tuber. I’ve never tried it before, but I like unusual plants, especially edible ones. It grew very large over the summer and I’m sure there is now a nice crown of tubers in the pot ready to sample. From what I’ve read, they are crispy and sweet when eaten raw.

In the meantime, it’s not a frost tolerant plant as far as I know, so the foliage’s days are numbered. Since I was doing some tidying up in the garden today, I decided to snip off some of the larger stems and see what the rabbits thought of them. I had already read online that they were safe to feed, and the thick stems and leaves were very similar to sunflowers, which I know the bunnies love.

Turns out they were very enthusiastic about them, although somewhat less so that with sunflowers. I’m always glad to find a new crop that the bunnies approve of.

Planting Garlic Bulbils

Posted on November 15, 2015 by onedogrunning

For some reason fall planting garlic around here is insanely expensive, like $30 to $50 per pound. I really don’t understand why it costs so much, seeing as regular grocery store garlic can be had for pennies per pound. Maybe the varieties are super special? I don’t know.

Anyway, when I moved here there were a few garlic plants growing here and there, I didn’t know what they were until they started sending out scapes. I left them alone and they developed garlic bulbils, which I’d never seen before. They kind of look like tiny garlic bulbs, hence the name.

So I had a handful of bulbils and I thought I would give them a try. I popped them all into a pot around September, and they did very well. Sending up long green shoots and filling out the pot with plump, white garlic-scented roots.

Since we still haven’t had a killing frost here on the island, I wanted to get them in the ground to see how they’d do over winter and come spring. I was able to put in 45 young plants today along with a bunch of chamomile that had sprouted alongside them in the pot.

Not a bad upgrade from just a few wayward plants. I look forward to seeing how they taste compared the fancy kinds. Garlic is pretty much garlic, is it not?