KMXT 100.1 FM Public Radio in Kodiak, Alaska
Kayla Desroches/KMXT
The Harvest Festival and Pumpkin Sale from Kodiak’s 4H branch will provide some of our fall favorites: from sweet confections to small, furry mammals. It will feature sugar pumpkins for baking and larger pumpkins suited to carving, as well as a bake sale and a petting zoo.
11-year-old 4H club member, Oskar Klausner, says he raises bunnies, which he’ll bring to the petting zoo this year.
“When we first moved here, the people before us had bunnies. I asked if they could give one of them to me, and so they did, and then I got another one for free at the fair, I think it was third year, three years ago, and so now I have two.”
He and his mother explain one is mix between a rex and flemish giant, and the other is a chinchilla rabbit, which have produced a litter of seven so far. Oskar explains rabbits are not too difficult to shelter.
“I have two cages for both of them and they don’t have a floor. We take boards about one inch wide and three feet long and we strap them to the bottom so that they eat the grass and not really get out, and then we move them around, so like a very slow lawn mower.”
He says during the winter, he puts them inside the green house. Oskar says he also grows vegetables: tomatoes, squash, lettuce, and sometimes tomatoes. When not homesteading, he takes part in 4H groups and says he especially likes “robotics.”
He says right now his team is planning to build a robot for the Kodiak championship, and the theme is trash, so their robot will compress garbage.
“It’s built out of a certain time of lego. It’s called minestorm. There’s like a software update… software thing… that you get on the computer and then you program it to certain things. You code it and then you put it into the robot and on, like, remote control, and then it does stuff. But it’s easy to screw up. There’s a lot of stuff for each movement, so sometimes you can get a wrong number.”
He says they are building up to the local competition and then will continue to state if they win. Oskar is also involved in other 4H camps, including archery and small animals. You can meet some of his rabbits on Saturday at the Harvest Festival and Pumpkin Sale. It begins at noon at the fairgrounds.
