Spring Updates
15 Apr 2011 Leave a Comment
Spring is finally here, warmer weather sweeping in improving our moods and the ambition of our breeding rabbits. There’s been a lot of rain on and off which we despise here, with a mess of a long driveway to get in and out of, but the temperatures have been so great, I’ll forgive the rain for now.
We have moved the majority of our cages over to the smaller side of our building to improve on our heating and cooling. Jeremy did a lot of work redoing the ceiling and we will be redoing the roof soon. We did have to go back to stacking four high, but luckily I can still reach the back of the fourth row with a stool. I do have to keep the Hollands Gabby regularly plays with on the bottom two rows, so the upper rows are mostly her brood stock. We have it set up mostly mini rex on one side, hollands on the other, though it seems that Gabby’s hollands often find themselves taking up vacant mini rex holes. We kept thirty grow out holes in the other side for spring and fall juniors. We plan on using those cages only when we are growing out for our breed nationals and/or convention. This spring we are not using them since we were unable to attend either.
We unfortunately had some home things that needed to be taken care of prohibiting us from attending nationals this year. Jeremy was also limited on vacation time with our big vacation in January taking up his saved time. We have decided to plan for convention in Indy for sure this fall, as Jeremy will have enough time built up. We plan to ride with Bob and Char again and Lynne and Gale also plan to ride. It will be a nice trip there with great company!
Gabby DID breed for spring nationals, so we have an abundance of holland juniors this spring. It’s been really nice for her to have so much depth in her junior classes, being able to show different juniors at each of the shows, with the exception of a couple she’s in love with right now and have to go to every show. We had to let some go that normally we would have loved to have kept, but she just doesn’t have the cage space. It also meant that we had to sell some more of her brood stock to make room for the juniors she just had to keep. These spring litters are still coming up, some not separated, and more decisions will have to be made, but hopefully we’ve bought ourselves a little bit more time.
Gabby was lucky enough this spring to have Airplane (SnowBall) go through an eager breeding stage. It comes and goes with his age, at five years old. So she bred many does to him and still has many litters coming. Two litters that are looking really nice are Peachy’s two by him, a blue tort doe and broken tort buck. They will be going to their first show on Saturday. We had to put Peachy down after she retained kits from her last breeding, so we’re very happy to have these two really nice babies out of her. Brandy also had a big litter by him, including two broken black does, a broken blue buck, a blue buck, and a blue tort doe. What a variety!
Gabby also had her first litters by Roehe’s Clyde and we are very impressed. His three does by Rein’s Amelia are the thickest most massive little does we’ve seen. All three are beautiful, two solids and one broken, though Gabby knows one tort will need to go 
Of couse Amelia’s last litter had Roxie, Lexie and Pax in it. Roxie is up to two best of breeds and Pax won a best opposite after we sold him. Lexie still has ear control, too much to show, but is really shorter and more typey than either of the others, so if we’re lucky her ears will drop!
We’re having a bit of a buck switch up here: No Name will be going down to live in Texas. This is a hard decision for Gabby, but she has so many children, grandchildren and now great grandchildren coming. We were lucky enough to get KK Thor a grand champion broken buck from Rosa to use on the herd. Gabby is also getting a tort buck from Harley Butler at nationals.
We haven’t been as lucky in our mini rex breedings, having barely any over winter. We are getting them to breed finally! We have a promising litter, of 7 blacks!, by MP Phoebe and MP Cosmico. Assault and Revolution have both been getting lots of action and we are really excited to see their babies.
We haven’t shown a whole lot, but MP Dreamlife went to her first show at Emporia and was 1st of 7 and BOS. This doe is a very young senior and wasn’t quite in coat, so she seems to still be getting better. I really hope to have more mini rex news over the next few posts.
