Stuff to do

So Kent decided to take the camera today and get pictures of me for the blog. Monday I spent hours cleaning the barn. Realized too late that I should have worn a mask. I reached critical mass after nearly 4 hours of working in there and gave myself a real asthma crisis. However, the raised beds are free of dead plants and covered with plastic for the winter. The tubs of worms (and the wonderful compost they create) have been aerated and seem to be doing well. I removed seven wheelbarrow loads of rabbit poo. And also rearranged things so that I had a clear span of counter for brushing rabbits and we could, in general, move around more freely.

Kent and I matched up three bunny couples last night and left them together until this morning. We're hoping that there were some successful unions. Since the New Zealand buck didn't seem to be making any progress with the does (and has since passed away, we suspect of old age), we put the New Zealand does with the Angora bucks, who were more than happy to have a little girlfriend action. We'll see if there are any litters in a month or so.

I'm thinking of planting some lettuce and arugula and seeing how it does in the cooler weather. It never fares well in the summer because the greenhouse is too warm and in the cold frames the critters ate it before we could get any. We are just now finishing up our tomatoes. When the first big freeze was headed our way, I grabbed scissors and cut off all the little bunches of green tomatoes. Some were marble sized, others perhaps, plum-sized. Kent didn't hold out any hope for them but I was optimistic. I spread them out in a seedling tray and covered them with newspapers and left them sitting indoors. Sure enough, every last one has been ripening and we've been enjoy and sharing our "bounty". Really, we ended up with several pounds of tasty tomatoes where otherwise we'd have had none at all.

Here's a picture of me holding our smallest and most useless bunny, Penelope. She is, however, sweet, cute and very silky to pet. She's a lilac Dutch and thus of no use even as a Dutch since lilac is a disqualified color. Stephanie rescued her from being sold to a pet store as snake food when she was still a tiny and adorable baby bunny. Oh, she's also skilled at eating and creating fertilizer. Yup. She's a complete indulgence.

Another project I've been working on is a set of shelves for my canning jars of dried beans, grains, veggies and fruit. They are beautiful to look at and a shelf would be attractive and useful to me. I don't have a lot of confidence that it's coming together well. It's my first real woodworking project and it turns out that my first mistakes were made when selecting the wood. It has many warps in many directions. And I'm sure those were only my first mistakes. We'll see... And, yes, once again Kent has caught me wearing my two mismatched shirts. (It wasn't cold enough for a jacket). And I've added an attractive dust mask. (I learned from my mistake on Monday, I wasn't about to sand without wearing protection.)

So, I've got stuff to do. And I should probably be doing some of it right now instead of blogging about it...