I thought it would be so fun today to give a little Hines Homestead update! Since we moved to our acreage almost two years ago, we have jumped right in to having animals! Some animals have come and gone, and some have stuck around for the full two years.
Two things to note before you read this blog post…
- Animals are really hard to photograph lol. They are constantly moving and it’s almost always chaos. So enjoy these pictures as much as you can!
- Animals are kinda gross and dirty. You may see glimpses of poop, pee, dirt, snot, etc in the backgrounds of these pictures. I know that perfectly curated homesteads have been kinda “in” lately, but our homestead is NOT perfectly curated and with animals comes bodily fluids…so be warned!
- Many of our animals are raised with the purpose of feeding our family. If this is something that bothers you, you will probably not want to read this post!
3 cats- 1 indoor and 2 outdoor
Just kidding. The cats are SUPPOSED to be 1 indoor and 2 outdoor, but none of them follow those rules and every time we open the door the outdoor cats run inside and the indoor cat runs outside. HAHA.
15 or so mature chickens- 13 hens and 2 roosters
Chickens are the gateway drug animal to all the homestead animals. They are so easy and so helpful to have around. We got our first chicks within a week of moving to this property, and I think we will always have chickens!
Our poor chicken flock has been decimated these past few months and we are down to only 15 layers (we had closer to 40 last summer). Still, we get about 10-12 fresh eggs daily and we love having these birds around. They are so entertaining, are great pest control, and the eggs are a huge bonus!
7 junior chickens
These chicks hatched in our own incubator in January, so they are about two months old! We call them “juniors” and they are very much in their awkward teenager phase haha! Right now these chicks are in the chicken tractor that Theo build from scraps, and in about a month they will move into the coop with the big chickens. They will start laying eggs around 5-6 months old, so probably sometime around July or August.
8 chicks
We took another round of eggs to school to hatch and these chicks currently live at school because is there anything more delightful than coming to school and seeing chicks? There is even a live cam of the chicks! Probably in a month or so, these ones will move in to the chicken tractor here at home. There is another round of chicks in the incubator at school, so we are hoping for a large hatch and those ones will eventually also come to live at our house.
4 pigs
The biggest animal that we have on our homestead is our pigs! This year, we have four castrated males, and they are about two months old right now. We raise these until they are full-grown, and then we butcher and process them ourselves and stock up our freezer. We will raise them all through the summer and most likely plan to butcher in late October or early November. Right now the pigs are in our barn, but Theo will set up their paddocks outside in the next week or so. They live in a paddock for 10-14 days and then get rotated to a new paddock. This gives them fresh grass, fresh ground to root in and gets them out of their own fecal matter.
4 mature bunnies- 1 male and 3 female
Bunnies are our newest endeavor…and bunny math is even more extreme than chicken math! We originally thought we had 1 female bunny, but it turned out that one was a male. So we decided to get another bunny and had to wait until she reached maturity before we could breed her. Somehow, that one bunny ended up being two bunnies. Then someone posted a free male bunny on our local Buy Nothing Group and we thought we had two male and two female bunnies. Then one day in February the confirmed male and female accidentally bred (see next animal on the list lol). Then, when we tried to breed the other male and female bunnies they fought like crazy, and it turns out they were both female. ….so now we know that we actually have 1 male and 3 females. One female (doe) just had 9 baby bunnies, and we are fairly sure that the other two does are pregnant. So it’s about to be bunny central around here.
We are breeding the rabbits both as pets and as meat. This first litter is to be sold as pets and the next litter we would like to try to use for meat.
4 baby bunnies
And the very cutest members of our homestead right now….are these baby bunnies! I DIE! They are SO CUTE! And they are even cuter in person than in the pictures! The litter originally had 9, but we lost 5 in a cold snap.
And that is spring on the homestead in 2024! Feel free to swing by for a visit if any of these animals are of interest to you or your kiddos. We love to share the excitement and knowledge that we gain everyday from being able to raise these wonderful animals.
Linking up with Hello Monday
Aw, those baby bunnies are adorable!