Frugal

Harvesting weeping willow for the bunnies

A young weeping willow tree growing by a creek.

Over the past few years, I have been harvesting weeping willow with Joyce from Elvis Parsley Store to make healthy fresh dried wreaths for the bunnies as a low-cost well-favored snack. They’re also great to have on hand for stasis episodes, as not only does willow contain natural aspirin, but they are also very tempting to rabbits and useful to judge their appetite with.

Rabbits enjoying a freshly dried willow wreath.

Weeping willow is often found next to lakes, creeks, and rivers and are generally considered an invasive species. They can also be grown as a fast-growing decorative tree in yards – if you know a neighbor with a tree, they often won’t turn down the help to keep the growth in check!

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Using a Zebra LP2844 thermal printer on Windows 7

About a year after I started my side business on Etsy selling decals and signs, I looked into buying a thermal printer to speed up my shipping process. Printing out labels on paper, trimming it, and taping them to the packages took a decent amount of time. Thermal printers are a great investment for serious businesses — they don’t need ink refills, you can print directly on properly sized labels, and the labels will not smear if they get wet.

Please note that the following Amazon links in this post are affiliate links, and I will receive a small commission if you make a purchase after clicking on my link.

I decided to purchase a used Zebra LP2844 thermal printer off of Craigslist for $110. A popular new option for sellers these days is the DYMO LabelWriter 4XL Label Maker, but the older Zebra thermal printer does the job just fine, and it was more than 50% cheaper than the DYMO new. (more…)

Mailing Gift Packages through USPS

rabbitor packages

A set of Christmas/New Year packages that I sent out in December.

Since joining the /r/rabbits community, especially the IRC channel, I have been sending many more gift packages to people all over the world than I did before. Frugal as I am, I did tons of research to figure out what would be the most economical way to ship these packages to everyone. Some caveats though is that I did not try to figure out how to ship something enormous or extremely heavy.

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Hay Bale Sources in the SF Bay Area

bales of hay

Bales of hay at Mary's Tack & Feed

The best money-saving tip I received about caring for rabbits is to buy a bale of hay from a local feed store instead of the tiny packs from the pet store. In California, bales are often ~100 lbs for only around $20-30 a bale, and these typically last about four months for two ~4.5 lb rabbits in my experience — disregarding Squishy since I have only had him for two months. I have heard from other bunny friends in other states that their bales are more like $5 for one!

For reference, anecdotally, I have bought bales of timothy for $30 and orchard grass for $26 in San Diego at Mary’s Tack & Feed, and I have bought bales of orchard grass for $28 and forage hay for $21 from Sam’s Downtown Feed in San Jose.

Regardless, having enough hay to feed two rabbits for over three months for less than $40 is quite a bargain in my book! I remember the first days of having Bao Bao, I would buy these $8 8 oz bags of timothy hay that would last less than two weeks. I can feed multiple bunnies hay for a month now for that price!

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DIY Hay Rack

hay rack

I previously made a hay rack for Bao Bao & Luna with two NIC panels and decided this past weekend that Squishy needed his own to keep the hay wastage down as well as make it easier to track his hay consumption. Since Squishy is such a tiny rabbit, I chose to use only one NIC panel to make his rack. And because I did a terrible job of taking good progress pics with my previous hay rack, I sought to improve this time around. 🙂

Let the instructions begin!

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