Hello fellow Sunflowers! Today I want to tell you about another farm failure and learning experience as well as share a building project with you. Hopefully you can learn something from our follies.
In early 2021 we being blessed with more eggs than I could stomach eating. So, we put up a sign in the yard by the road that advertised farm fresh eggs and had a number to call. Granted were we lived most people already had chickens of their own or had someone who was supplying them with farm fresh eggs but it was an honest try that turned up very little business.
One day our driveway alarm goes off and I poke my head out to see who is coming up the driveway. It was not a vehicle I knew so I proceeded to go out and meet the visitor. The gentleman introduced himself as a down the road neighbor and mentioned seeing our sign in the yard. I asked him if he was interested in eggs. He said no he had his own chickens but was curious if we had ducks. I told him no but having a pond already it was on our list of animals we would like to have.
He smiled really big and said, “Well if you want some, I have some I am giving away.”
Not one to turn down free animals with or without permission from Delisa I accepted the offer and told him to bring them over when he catches them up.
That weekend he brought over seven full grown mallard ducks and Chinese goose. There were two males and five female ducks and he released them into our pond. I am sure you can imagine but they took to it like, well, a duck to water.
We asked him why he was giving them away since they looked very healthy and obviously in egg laying age. He then explained that his wife said they had to go or he had to go. They were in the middle of a pond remodel and they no longer had a pond to enjoy but had found the next best thing, his wife’s swimming pool.
If you aren’t aware ducks tend to prefer to poop in water when that is an option. With that tidbit of knowledge, you can see how aggravating that would be to share a pool with ducks. So, we ended up with ducks on the farm. Oh, and one big white goose. He became a favorite for his loud honking any time someone came into the pasture. He was very protective of his ducks and the farm. He was a ready-made guard goose. I decided he needed a name that was fitting of his station and looks. Since he would not let anyone pass without announcing them and he was white be became known as Gandalf the White, or Gandalf for short. I do love naming animals silly but appropriate names.
It was great. They were like a pack of puppies that quacked. They would run up from the pond to the barn at feeding time and follow you around hoping for extra food. They always swam in packs and ran around in a pack almost synchronized in their motion. They were a joy to watch on the farm.
UNTIL… it got warm enough for our neighbor to open up her in ground swimming pool. As it turns out a duck, while much larger overall, is narrower than a chicken. The ducks quickly found they could slip through the fencing and found the new favorite place to sleep, in our neighbors swimming pool. The mess they made was rather impressive. I decided the fix was a simple two-part plan. First, I decided, maybe they would like a hut down by the pond and that would make them less likely to wander off property. Second was to secure the fence between us and the pool neighbor a little more so they couldn’t just slip through.
I spent a day or so drawing up plans and figuring out material needs for one duck hut. I settled on a three-sided box with a single slope roof design. I set the height for the back wall, which is the shortest, at three feet tall by four feet wide and proceeded to attempt math to set the angles on my chop saw and build the frame.
That didn’t work as planned at all. My math wasn’t the greatest and my angles were all messed up as you can see here.
It became time to set the engineering hat down and pick up my farmer hat and just make the dang thing. I had my sides built but my angles at the top were off so I found a long board to use as a straight edge and marked the line I needed then cut accordingly.
This worked perfectly and soon I had a framework with a roof from the leftover plastic panels from our coop remodel and expansion. With the frame built and the roof on, I bought a stack of cheap fence pickets. They are thin wide boards that are already pressure treated and ready for outdoor use. They made a great siding and split down the middle they made good trim as well. The duck hut was ready and placed along the edge of the pond near one of their usual routes in and out of the water.
Step two involved a lot of zip ties, chicken wire and a few cuss words. Along the fence where the ducks were able to squeeze through, I took some two feet high chicken wire and zip tied it in place as a temporary way to make sure it was going to fix the issue. One hundred and fifty feet of wire, three or four bags of zip ties and a couple shocks on the neighbor’s electric top wire later I thought I was done.
The morning after fixing the fence, the ducks were still on our pond and I declared victory. Alas, like many foolish un-blooded generals I was merely the winner of the opening skirmish. That night we receive a message from our pool neighbor that she had seven visitors in her pool. We quickly went over and herded them back into our back yard, which has more secure fences, and I began scratching my head.
I again attacked the problem with more fencing and zip ties, extending along the east fence that neighbors our horse neighbors. I fenced along to the point where the grass and weeds are thick along the back side of the pond and stopped. The ducks rarely went on the back side to Peewee’s favorite corner so I assumed our problems of escaping ducks was over.
I was wrong. The ducks found out that in the evening our horse neighbor was feeding grain to his horses and they could get across in Peewee’s corner and eat the dropped grain and then move from his pasture to the pool. Once again, we were herding ducks in the dark and I was out of options. To fix the rest of the fence up, even temporarily, was cost prohibitive and we weren’t set up to harvest the ducks.
So, we did the only thing we could, we reached out to friends who had a homestead and no neighbors with a pool. They gladly accepted the gift of seven ducks to swim in their pond and be a part of their family. We kept Gandalf as a guard goose and because he can’t get out. He happily swims the pond, alerts us to intruders and on occasions herds the chickens around when they let him.
Hopefully, this was entertaining and informative and you will stick around to see what happens next on our little farm. Y’all have a Sunflowery day!
Sunflower Farms MS 