Hello Hive

Happy weekend to my fellow homesteaders. Hope we are having a peaceful weekend with enough motivation to do our tasks for the day.

Today marks another milestone for me and my family, after which we have now been able to get some good species of animals to begin our poultry farm journey. The rabbits we ordered were delivered yesterday.
Remember how I had blogged about us constructing these animal cages some weeks ago?

We made use of fairly used aluminum and some wood to do this. A two-step animal house that was built for us with the assistance of a young carpenter. He used net wiring to separate each layer from another with a section in between where their exudates can be collected.

The rabbits have now been placed in the place designated for them. We got a male and a female; both of them are black in color and shy, as you can see. They both ran to the rear end of the cage to escape from the camera.

We equally bought their feeds, and you can see the pellets they feed on. Recently I realized that rabbits can eat potato leaves as food, but because these are really some newborns, we do not want to feed them with something they aren't familiar with yet. Once they attain a certain level of maturity, we can try to feed them different meals, as the modern feeds often sold for feeding these animals are usually more expensive than when we feed them with our natural foods.

The broiler birds were bought earlier, and they are about 6 weeks old now, all feeding on the industrially made meals. There are different kinds of bird/poultry species, and we will be trying each to know what they can best feed on. Some are less expensive to raise, and whether for food or commercial purposes, we have to be mindful of the financial implications. Broilers are mainly for meat purposes, layers are meant for egg production, and I have recently just heard about Noilers, which are for both egg and meat purposes.

The chickens are barely 5 weeks old, and you can see their sizes. A weighing scale ⚖️ is often used to keep track of their weight to determine if they are growing well or not. For now they are all healthy and doing well. A measured quantity of their feed is often given to them in order not to overfeed them. Overfeeding can cause them to get overweight, and I learned that their weight must be kept at a certain number equivalent to their age.

Our 🦃🦃🦃🦃 is here too. We picked up a single female specimen from the poultry seller. We can hardly tell if this is a female or male, but as soon as we identify that, we will be getting the counter gender so that they can stay together for fertility purposes. While my sister has a good number of this turkey where she lives, I'm hoping that her turkey will lay eggs soon as well so that I can pick up some more poult.

Even though we have very few birds in cages for now, as soon as there is more expansion, we will start working on getting larger places as the birds and other animals multiply.

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