Meat Nuggets: Episode 3 — CampFIRE Homesteading

We recently wrote about the importance of knowing where your food comes from, and harvesting our meat rabbits for the first time was a real-life lesson in appreciating our food. Harvesting wasn’t fun, but with very grateful hearts, we were very happy with the end result. To recap, check our Episode 1 & Episode 2.

About a month ago, we harvested 14 meat rabbits. They were 12 weeks old, and the weather was awesome for November. We are so excited to have 25 lbs. of meat in our freezer. Not only is this meat free of any antibiotics or mystery chemicals, but they were raised with care and dispatched quickly and humanely. Since they eat mostly grass, our meat rabbit operation is incredibly sustainable. We couldn’t believe how efficient they were at “mowing” around our garden for us. All their little manure pellets would easily rake right into the garden rows as an extra bonus if we wanted. We let them lay where they landed though, to make sure the grass grew really well for next year when we expand our operation.

It is really humbling to harvest your own meat. I love deer hunting, but there’s always a deep sadness with the reality of the kill. We’ve adopted the “one bad day” mantra, and took great care of our animals. Our hope is that our animals never know their last day is a bad day. They don’t deserve that stress, and it also is a great benefit to us if they are not releasing stress hormones into their muscles.

Having 25 lbs. of quality meat in your freezer is one thing, but when you discover how delicious it is, that is a game changer, friends! We were blown away at how tasty the rabbit meat was. My Love cooked it up as rabbit curry, and we ate the whole rabbit! Somehow, we saved the front legs for last. What a treat! I wasn’t hungry any more so My Love was going to eat both, until he bit into the leg. “This is the better than any chicken wing I’ve ever had. You’ve got to try this rabbit wing!”

And he was so right! It was so tasty! While we’re excited about the meat in our freezer, we’re most excited about our rabbit wings!

We’ve learned a bit about how nutritious rabbit meat is, and that it’s a delicacy for white tablecloth restaurants. Given how delicious the meat is, how easy they are to grow, we’re pretty flabbergasted as to why we all don’t have meat rabbits and chickens in our backyards. The rabbits don’t make noise and they poop garden gold—their manure is “cold” in that you can immediately lay their manure on your garden with very little risk (if any at all) of burning your plants from too much of one soil element over another. (Chicken manure is “hot” because of how concentrated the nitrogen is—it will burn plants!) Sure, their urine is a little strong, but as long as you have them over dirt, the ground will soak it right up and spare you the strong smell.

Oh, and they…. breed like rabbits! From the YouTubers we watched, some people breed their meat rabbits several times a year. We don’t intend to breed our does this intensely because we want them to have breaks and space for themselves. Always being pregnant or sharing their area with always-wanting-more-milk kits sounds rough! Plus, it’s just the two of us. If we find we want to breed more often, we’ll just grow our operation and have more breeders!

We used the rib cages to make 1.5 gallons of bone broth—it tastes just like turkey broth! And we saved the kidneys, liver, heart and lungs. We’ll fry some parts up for Luna, and we’ll save the rest to use for cat fish bait. Speaking of Luna… after we strained the bone broth, we had two pounds of scrap meat and tendons that had fallen off. She has this whole bag in the fridge with her name on it, getting a little bit in her supper. Spoiled pup! Two extra bonus pounds, just from boiling everything down for a couple hours!

Everything else went in the compost pile. I’m excited to “tan” the hides after we move, but we didn’t want to have one more thing to move right now. (No updates on that, we’re still planning and trying to figure out what our options are!) I think it would be really cool to sew some projects with our own furs/hides. So many great nutrients for next year’s plants.

This was a great experience. We can’t wait to do it again once the weather warms up!