One month into the new year and boy did it go by fast. We have been working nonstop since the Holidays and our work continues. This month will be just as busy as the last, if not busier! We are going to have a booth at the Black River Coliseum for the Indoor Yard Sale. If you're in the neighborhood, please stop by our booth. We'll be happy to see you all!
This month we are starting a handful of early seedlings for our massive garden. We have obtained half of our bee equipment. We also stumbled across a comic book shop in Poplar Bluff downtown. We understand there was a comic book shop down there a few years ago and it closed. This one is new and quite open for business. It's at the end of Poplar St. where the Post Office is located and the one-way street the Court House is on. We hope you stop by if you enjoy comics and merchandise or know a family or friend that does. If you mention to the owner you heard about the store from our site, Handled with Care Farm and Rabbitry, you'll receive a discount on your purchase! The shop does special orders with a minimum deposit and has a vast selection of comic books! Stop the shop or drop us a line if you need a website or phone number. I would put it up now, but I seem to have misplaced the business card. :)
So seeds, pregnant bunnies and a weaning liter, selling events, and new friends litter this month. I almost forgot that Kristy and I will be talking to the committee board for the Butler County Fair to reinstate the Poultry and small animal competitions. So far all they have is a small pet competition. We know that people our interested in entering their poultry and we would love to hear from you. We will be talking to the committee on the 14th of February. Please drop us a line by then and tell us what you think. That's all for now. Next month is full of events too. The Fruitland poultry and small live stock swap starts on the 2nd Saturday of March and continues every 2nd Saturday of each month. More on that as it comes up.
Take care all!

-A

Hello All! We have had a happy and busy week! We currently joined a small Farmer's Market that is just lovely! All of the vendors are so friendly and made us feel very welcome. We will be putting pictures of our "table" up on the "Crafting" section. Hopefully if you visited us and received a card that brought you to this website, you will visit our table next week! We will be bringing Hazel, Cleopatra and Frodo with us to show off and let everyone see some of our rabbits up close. We will also have four guineas with us either this coming Saturday or the one after. More details on that later. The animals will be for exhibition purposes--to give people a better idea of what they can expect from our rabbitry--but Angel should be having babies very soon. After palpating we felt what we believed was at least one fetus and she shows some other signs such as getting fatter and growling when we pick her up. On the 14th of October we will be placing the nest box into her cage and I will be reporting her behavior--and hopefully posting some pictures! If you are already on our waiting list for a baby, you will be receiving a call from us as soon as she kindles!

In other news, we are doing big renovations on our barn! We have pulled tin off of the side and put our posts up for the Turkey and Silkie pens! we only have to finish the wire yard and inside part of the coop and we'll be in good shape! Hopefully by the end of next week they'll all be in their new homes enjoying more space. I will post more pictures as soon as the construction is done and the birds have been moved around! For now, here's some in-progress shots!

Wish us luck and hopefully we'll see you at the farmer's market!

K

Our website is now finished enough to publish. We thank you for visiting and hope that you will fill out a Contact Information Form with any question you may have. Also, if you received a card with our phone numbers, feel free to contact us by phone at any time!
To polish the website we took some updated pictures of the rabbits. It took about an hour and some of them were not too thrilled but cheered up after receiving a treat or two--those are the blue things in some of the pictures. Our Lionhead doe Angel is bred and we will be palpating to confirm this in a couple of days. As soon as she gives birth we will count the babies and identify--as well as possible--colors. When she is calm enough we will photograph the nest box and the babies. Hopefully we have a good healthy litter! Thank you for visiting!

K

It's finally here! Our website! Our blog! Well as I write this, its only the blog, and it's mostly a blank page waiting for me to fix it. The name of my farm--and this website--is Handled With Care, because all of the animals, produce and handmade goods on the farm are carefully and lovingly prepared and handled. We are two brand new farmers, two best friends--one from Southeast Missouri (K/Me) and the other from Boston, Mass (A). At first I simply wanted a handful of chickens as pets and for the occasional egg. Then A wanted Bunnies. Then someone suggested we keep guinea fowl for tick control, then I decided Turkeys would be fun. After ample research, we ordered the birds--15 Australorps, 5 BBS Silkies and 15 guinea fowl in assorted colors. They were to arrive on the last day of June. In the meantime, a local weekly market featuring livestock, produce and yard-sale-like items provided us with our other poultry, our three beautiful Narragansett Turkeys. After a few ups and downs with our first rabbits, we finally managed to gather a New Zealand Red and five decent Lionheads.

A few weeks later, we had a brooder full of chicks--14 Australorp chicks, 15 guineas (2 lavender, 5 pearl and 8 white) and 5 tiny silkies--and we had eight rabbits after adding two New Zealand Whites. The chihuahua and two cats were puzzled at best, and one cat camped outside of the bathroom--where the brooder was--for the first week. Emergencies abounded, a strange-acting Silkie, a pasty guinea butt, constantly putting up tarps and taking them down to keep the three baby turkeys dry but not overheated on stormy summer days. It was traumatic, moreso for us than the animals, but we managed to pull through. The chickens grew, and so did our rabbitry, adding three beautiful Lionheads and one quirky little Dwarf Hotot doe named Cleopatra.

Our next big step was getting the fully-feathered chicks and keets out of our bathroom and into their outdoor coop my uncle was building for us. A lot of screaming and flapping and our birds--minus two guineas and plus five Silkies--were happy in their large pen. A massive road trip to the state fair brought us three more Dwarf Hotots and our rabbitry was complete.

We handmade seven cages and reporposed a gigantic dog kennel to cart four chickens, two turkeys and six rabbits to the County Fair and left with five blue ribbons and six reds--poor ugly teenage guineas didn't place, and the Turkeys got second only because they had no competition. Now, we've found a small Farmer's Market to sell a few handmade items and extra livestock. They were very welcoming and part of the reason we finished this website and started a blog. A and myself will be making blog entries and will sign our posts accordingly. Hopefully it will always be good news!

K