End of a Line?

    Before I began to write what will be my last blog entry of 2014 I read some of the titles of my previous blogs. I did this because I wanted to get a sense of what I'd written about over this past year, so much has happened and the memories become muddled together. I see that many of my blog titles have been one word and have also been something close to virtues or ideals. I didn't start out thinking of writing the type of blog I have, it was meant to be more informational and less cerebral, but I hope I have still gotten my point across. That point is farming is fun and work, rewarding and disappointing, requires hoping for the future but also requires looking backward. These points almost seems antithetical and yet they are, as we have learned this year part of farming. We have invested a lot of ourselves and our resources into this project, not only physically but emotionally as well, and there have been rewards and trials to accompany those investments.
    We have been rewarded with a bountiful harvest from our garden and a freezer still full of produce. We leaned how to blanch and freeze our produce, we made ice cream from freshly harvested raspberries, Kathy made refrigerator pickles and she even sold some which was our first produce sale. We added a new doe named Isis to our herd of rabbits and had more litters and produced more rabbit meat than ever. We also lost long waited for crops to infestations of worms, moths, beetles and every creepy crawly thing you can imagine. We lost our first buck, Chase, to a still unknown malady and a few months later his only surviving son followed him to a similar end. I know that they were farm animals and yet I had so much invested in them emotionally that I felt my heart was torn in two as I watched them falter. I did learn to watch for symptoms and I may have saved Iris and Isis from falling to the same condition, I'm wiser because of my two bucks.
   The last blog I wrote spoke of waiting games and those games are almost at a conclusion for my rabbit herd. I bred Isaac to Iris and Isis just before his failure of health became evident and although the process and outcome was suspect in my eyes I have maintained a sense of hope that I would be able to continue Chase's lineage. The waiting game is close to over and neither doe had kindled and by tomorrow I should know if that line will continue or not. Isis continues to give me reason to hope for a litter sired by Isaac but Iris does not and so the waiting game continues for one more day. The reason for waiting this final day is that it is the maximum gestation period for a female rabbit and so New Years day will dawn with a new year but also, perhaps with the end of a line. I won't give up on breeding rabbits, it's not in my nature to quit so easily but I am faced with the fact that where I started and where I hoped to end up may not be the same place. If there is an end to this line then I'll start another, but I'll be much wiser and more experienced. I hope anyone who reads this blog will come to appreciate the work and dedication it takes to run even the smallest farm and that you might even want to try it yourself. If you ride a train to the end of the line takes you to your journey's end, if we arrive at the end of Chase's line it will be only the beginning of something new.