Blog 18/19

Well its been even longer since our last blog for which we apologise...absolutely loads going on so I got side-tracked...a lot...which if you talk to Kim is nothing unusual lol. What makes it worse is that you forget all the different things that have happened because of the time lag but I will do my best.
                         

Our Argente programme has progressed to the next level as we mated up the lovely little agouti 'Lil Kim' we got from Sue Burgess to our f1 buck Snoop Dog. The result was 3 very different colours

This is the little cinnamon, as you can see the silvering can be seen here but not as distinctive as the black

The black shows the silvering off very effectively and at 8 weeks this is very good, 

The tort or sooty has the least amount of silvering but has the better ear at the moment so we will have to run all 3 on before we decide on what we need for the next stage of the argente programme.

Well once the excitement of London was over we only went to 2 other shows East Herts and Harlow...the lovely surprise at East Herts was that we got best in show on the day....with another Siberian lol so a lovely finish to the year before we stopped showing and concentrated on the rabbits.

Which brings us on to our other news and that was that we decided to open up our outside area to a more professional approach; having boarded our own pet stock over the years we decided to advertise a boarding service. First was deciding that we needed new hutches...the original out door block is over 15 years old and although a little tatty looking is still holding together :)

 We ordered 3 new blocks from a local hutch builder and they suit our needs really well, nice size, well put together and although i had to trim an inch off the feet, went in to the outside area quite snugly.

The only down side is that you have to bitumen the floors yourself which doesn't take to long actually..

 its the painting that takes the time lol. I got one block painted and transferred the Argentes over before starting on the second block except we then got a call for our boarding service and had a boarder for 16 days which was brilliant :)

We had advertised our service that same week so to get a call that quick was impressive, we had even built a web site http://stevetoltonst.wix.com/the-warren which was where the owners had come across us :)
So we just need to order the next set of hutches which we will do after xmas then we can remove the old blocks and put them somewhere else ;) Having built the web site we decided to produce another Tarax Stud web page as we were being restricted on the old site http://taraxstudrabbits.wix.com/tarax-stud we had great fun building that one as well though i do need to update some more pictures on there.

Well it has been hectic here since then...we have had some mating's done though there have been some ups and downs :( 3 does had kits but unfortunately lost them but  our next 2 does successfully had there's. Sweet pea did have 2 but lost one straight away so has been going overboard with cleaning and feeding....every 20 mins lol...the baby looks like a baby sumo...its so round it cant turn over so sleeps on its back.....as you can see below lol, all you get is a slight twitching of all 4 legs :)

Well thats the run down for this months blog do look at our boarding web site and also our Tarax Stud site and let us know what you think :) The next blog will be after xmas so to all our followers, readers and lurkers, have a very Merry Christmas and of course a very Happy New Year 

Steve & Kim