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.
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!
One of the latest bunny community projects I’ve been involved in is the bunnyhood of traveling dress. Unfortunately, I haven’t managed to stuff any of the bunnies yet in it, but I dressed Mimi up in the meantime so I had something to write about since I’ve had the dress for half a week now. 😛
For the past year of bunny ownership, I have been using a couple of litter box setups that are great at making it easy to dump used hay and poops regularly, help the litter beneath last longer before changes, and keep the rabbits’ feet nice and clean.
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. 🙂