Hi all

First time on this site, and I have to say that I love it! I am introducing our townie kids (and townie parter) to the wonderful world of farming. So far the kids are loving it, but we will see how that goes when they start having to do the work!

Welcome darkhorse, tell us a bit more about your LSB!

Well we are in the lucky position to be able to utilise a friends 6 acre paddock as a training run while we save for our own block. I spent alot of time on my Grand Parents farm in Port Chalmers as a child, and started to get a bit sick of my sissy townie children. That is when my mate said we could use his block. We run our chooks at home (on the out skirts of Invercargill), with the farm only a 5 minute drive from here. We raised 4 orphans last year as the lesson from lamb to table (I so missed homekill!), which the children thoroughly enjoyed. No squeamish children here! I was very proud when we killed our first lamb at the start of the year, you could not keep the kids away. So now we are wanting to start our own flock, with a view to either buying 10 acres of our own, or purchasing the block we are currently running on.

Welcome. Cavies and rabbits make good meat too. When we had tame rabbits the wild ones mated through the birdnetting so we rapidly got lots of very fastmoving half-wilds. Had to get a longhandled fish landing net to catch them with when they escaped, otherwise the vege garden got ruined in about 10 minutes.

The kids can handle eating wild rabbit, but I think the holland lop is strictly off limits lol. The kids also enjoyed killing a chicken last year, they were all rather enthusiastic when it came to plucking and gutting. Little miss 3 is the most well adjusted child I have met, and she is not afraid to gut ANYTHING, but only if she gets to eat it!

Hi darkhorse and welcome to this great site I agree that the lsb is a great environment for bringing up kids, not only can they help with the animal chores, but they have the opportunity to understand how systems work (raising meat for homekill etc) and the potential for small business like selling eggs etc. (Even if it is only selling them to mum and dad).
And I see you have a big tribe to help you too