Californian Kits all but sold

This afternoon was a busy time for phone calls about Rabbits!! When we were researching which breeds to buy and breed, it seemed that both Flemish Giant and Californian pure breds were hard to come by. We spoke to breeders all over Australia trying to track down these breeds. The Flemish were a little easier to come by, and eventually after quite a few months of searching, we bought our first 2 Flemish Does from Bacchus Marsh Vic. We then tracked down our oldest male Flemish, then a few months later we located our younger 2 Does, and 1 buck - that was our Flemish breeding adults sorted! It took a number of months more of searching to find Californians, we were lucky enough to source 4, 2 bucks, and 2 Does, and travelled to Melbourne to pick them up (they had travelled from NSW).

One of the calls I took today, comfirmed just how rare Californian's are, and as a result of other breeders trying to broaden their breeding stock, we may well have sold our entire litter of 10 Californians! We will also have the contacts of other breeders in different areas of Australia so we too can broaden our breeding stock!! :-)

anyway.. it's now getting late and time to go!! :-)

Rabbits, Rabbits and more Rabbits!!

Well it's been quite awhile since my last post! We did have a week away in Canberra (which I'll cover a bit later), and on our return we found our second Californian had her babies! She has 7 healthy little kits! :-) 10 days on and they are continuing to grow, they have soft white fur now, and will soon be opening their eyes.

Our first lot of Californians are growing quickly - they will be ready to sell and rehome the week before Christmas - here are a couple of photos of our newest additions:

and hopefully if it will let me load a 3rd picture, here are a couple of Liam with the babies :-)

Liam just adores them, and we go and play with them at least once everyday!! :-) They are very cute, and friendly.

So if anyone reading this (living in Australia!) is interested in buying a large rabbit breed - let me know!! :-)

We currently have 17 Californian babies, 10 ready to go just before Christmas, the other 7 ready to go early mid January 2012. We also still have one Flemish Giant, a white male available - he is currently 12 weeks old. We are also expecting one of our does to have her kits in the next week or so, so we'll see how many more Flemish kits we have :-)

Then that will be it for this year, we won't breed our girls until March next year, to give them a break over the hotter summer months.

It's good to be home after our small holiday away, however I am less happy to be home sick with an awful cold!! Oh well, hopefully by Thursday I'll be at least a bit better and be back to work! :-)

9 day old Californians

We have 10 healthy Californian rabbits – they are 9 days old today, sadly we did lose 1 more which takes us from 12 down to 10... We are hopeful that the 10 we have will continue to grow and remain healthy!

They are looking very cute now as they start to grow some white fur, here are some photos taken today,

We are also expecting another litter between the 29^th November and 2^nd December, as we mated ‘dad’ our older Californian (and father to the above rabbits) with our younger Californian...

Meanwhile our Flemish Giant rabbits are now around 9 weeks old, we sold 1 doe, but still have 3 does and 1 buck left. Hopefully we will get some more interest in them soon.

We had a garage sale today, but unfortunately it didn’t go as well as we had hoped... it was a bit slow, although we did sell quite a bit of our honey!! So that was good, I had also hoped to have sold some of our honeycomb rounds, but despite interest in it – none actually sold!

So we decided to open our garage sale again next Sunday in the hope that we can sell some more or our stuff!! J

Californians

So our first Californian kits were born on the 3rd November 2011!! All 12 of them - here is a photo of them at 2 days old :-)

We are now on day 6, and unfortunately 2 of our kits aren't looking too good! After doing some reading, a few breeders suggest actually making sure 2 does are pregnant at the same time, and having the babies within days of each other. This way, if 1 doe has a large litter, and the other a smaller litter, you can then swap the kits around so they get fed! :-) We will definately do this in future...as we will be sad to lose any babies!! All we can do is keep checking them, I've moved the 2 really skinny ones to the top and front so I'm hoping they will get some milk at the next feed... :-)

Baby Californian rabbits

Just a quick post, I arrived home from work today with the news our Californian had her babies! I went and hada look, and counted 12!! I couldn't believe there were so many.... I think unfortunately that not all of them will make it..but we will see how we go! :-)

garage sale preparation and scissor skills....

Well, we've decided to have a garage sale! We have an awful lot of "stuff" and at the moment it is sitting here, (and some of it has sat here for an awfully long time!!) doing nothing, so we thought why not try and sell it! One persons trash is another treasure....right?? :-)

We will have a huge variety of goods, farm machinery, including Damian's hay baler and rake, we'll be selling our honey 'Pine Ridge Honey', our rabbits will also be for sale, our 4 Flemish Giants and the soon to be born Californian's.... then there are the womens, mens and baby/toddler boy clothes, toys, furniture, 2 queen bed frames, 1 single bed frame, even a kitchen sink!!!  and all sorts of other goodies!! If you want to know more (and you are near Mount Gambier) you will have to come along for a look on the 12th November..

Anyway...so the last few days I've been going through boxes finding goodies to sell and came across some of my kids books, some of which I want to keep others I will sell. I noticed this afternoon that Liam had a couple of my books and thought "how nice" that he is interested in my old kids books. As I looked closer at his table, he is standing there engrossed in 1 of his favourite activities - cutting.... he loves practicing his 'scissor skills' it's just a shame that he was cutting up one of my books!! Not happy!

and prior to this he had been trying out his acrobatic skills on the couch, somersaulting and jumping around - therefore he felt the need to strip down to his jocks and singlet.. :-)

and now it's off to bed.....

Big Baby Rabbits :-)

We are very excited, we sold our first baby rabbit on Saturday! The babies are 7 weeks old now, and they are already quite large!! I made up some ads, and the only place we advertised was at the local Rotary Market - and we got a call that same day. The first question our potential buyer asked was "is there a doe"... hmm we had no idea!! So I said we'd call her back....

So Damian and I went out, and Damian caught the babies one by one, turned them pretty much upside down, and squeezed below so we could "sex them" and see what we had! Turns out that both black rabbits, and the 2 white ones with red eyes are all females and the white rabbit with black eyes is the only male.

We called back our potential buyer and she agreed to come and have a look, half an hour later we sold our first bunny!! :-)

Here are some photos of our cute rabbits :-)

The adult rabbit above (Morgana) is actually the 'aunty' not the mother, I was surprised seeing as the kits don't seem to have any tan/brown at all!

This one here shows the 'mum' Gwen :-) and interestingly just the other day when looking at the black rabbits, one of them is actually getting more brown behind his ears! It will be interesting to see how they change colour as they get older. If anyone is interested in rabbits :-) send me a message.

We are also expecting one of our Californian does to give birth between the 3rd and 6th of November... there will be pictures to follow!