We were on the right path to being able to feed ourselves, in theory anyway - one of the issues that would be a stumbling block for us would be meat. We happened to be visiting a local What! shop and found that they had some rather cheap rabbit hutches, and as a bonus they had a further 20% off. Naturally, we could not resist. Only that morning, we had been discussing the pro’s and con’s of keeping rabbits - and the cost of the hutches was a bit of an issue. We had previously looked at Pets At Home, but, were put off by the over priced cages and lack of staff’s knowledge on all things pet related - as well as a lack of gumption from the store assistant. Rabbits at Pets At Home were a staggering £52 for two, and we would be needing at least two does and one buck for our breeding programme. Now we had the cages, we only needed the rabbits to fill them. There was no way that we were paying the huge markup for the retailers New Zealand Whites. We resorted to our frugal friend, Froogle, Uh, I mean google. After several hours of searching the net and making numerous phone calls to potential breeders, we found a local smallholding that had a litter of 9 week old New Zealand White rabbits. Within half an hour we were eyeing up two does and a choice of two bucks. Naturally, we needed the two does, but only wanted one buck. At £10 a head, we agreed on the three that we wanted, but did feel slightly sorry for the sole remaining buck. The smallholders decided that it would be too much hassle to advertise the single rabbit, and added him to our cardboard box full of furs for free, as well as all their remaining rabbit food and 1 doz chicken, duck and turkey eggs. It just shows that you can still get a bargain by avoiding the big retailers and going directly to source. We would have paid in the £104 for the 4 rabbits in Pets at Home, but we found the same variety, same age rabbits for £30. Plus of course, a good supply of eggs to keep us going until our hens started to lay. What will become of the extra buck that we don’t require? Don’t worry, he is comfy and well looked after - he is being fattened up for our Christmas lunch!
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Following on from my post where I talk about how we had decided to bypass the retailers and become our own producers, we took the plunge and made the commitment to produce as much of our own food stuffs as we can. This sounded daunting in theory, but when we sat back and realised the scale of what we were about to undertake, we had to question our sanity. We would need meat - we are not vegetarians, and any time we bypass meat from our diets we feel unsatisfied and needing a good plump fillet steak. How could we produce meat for the table, at minimal cost? Simply, we would breed our own rabbits. I will cover keeping rabbits for meat in a later post. We also had decided to keep chickens for eggs, which seems to be a new up and coming hobby for many people in this rural area. There is nowt better than tucking into a large egg, that is still warm from the chickens backside. What we really needed though was to grow our own vegetables, to have enough of a harvest to see us through the winter and spring. We have one allotment, that we have had for about three years, and to be honest, up until now we have played at being allotmenteers, and any harvest we collected was simply a bonus to our commercialistic shopping habits. However, we feared that the one allotment would not be enough to provide all the veggies that we would need. . . And so onto the hunt for more land!
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