On my couple of acres, sustainability is high on the list of eventual goals. Ducks help me reach that goal.
Two summers ago I was given a duck with an injured leg. On inspecting it, we found a wire was wrapped around the upper leg, under the feathers. The duck’s skin had grown over part of the wire, and the leg was deformed around it. The vet said that the duck would always limp, but that it didn’t appear to be in too much pain with the wire removed. She was our first duck, and she loves to eat- vacuuming up food like crazy. Her name is Hoover, and she lays three large mossy-white eggs a week . Since then we’ve acquired six more ducks, Pekins, Khaki Campbells and a small brown one with a green beak that just showed up one day.
The ducks each lay about 3 eggs a week, usually in the evening, which a local veggie market sells for me. And each day, shortly after sunrise, the ducks line up at the door to the poultry yard to be let out into the vegetable garden to go to work.
First they march over to the tomatoes, squawking loudly if they find a tomato hornworm that is too high for them to reach. I pull it down, and the duck that spotted it gets it, while the others look for worms lower down. After hornworm patrol, they put their bills into the edges of each bed looking for slugs and other creepy crawlers. They then head over to the raspberries where they’ve learned that if they grab the leaves and give a sharp jerk, japanese beetles will rain down on their heads. If there are no beetles, at least they get a bite of leaf.
About that time, I’ve fed the other animals, and the ducks are ready for a break. I turn on the sprinkler to any dry part of the garden, and the ducks come over to play in the water, and dig through the wet soil with their bills. They eat the small weeds anywhere the soil is damp.
If I need a bed weeded, and the weeds are small, and the vegetables are well established, I can put the sprinkler on that bed, and the ducks will eat the weedlings without bothering the vegetables too much. They might sample a leaf here and there, but since they like baby weeds better, they don’t sample too many.
If the day is hot, they head over to the bean tunnel, and clear themselves a place in the shade of the bean vines. I keep a small baby pool full of water over there for the squirrels to drink from so they don’t bite holes in my cucumbers and tomatoes when they are thirsty. The ducks like to play in it too, during the hottest part of the day.
After the humans eat dinner, the ducks line up at the gate to the poultry yard again, this time to be let in for the evening. They eat some of the duck feed I buy, play in the large pool we have sunk into the ground just for them, and go off to lay eggs.