Ducks in the Garden

Tuesday we spent the whole day at the farm. It was a light school day, and we had people coming over to pick up their turkeys for Thanksgiving, so it made sense to make if a farm day.

Rocking the cool farmer look.

We checked on our ducks in the garden. They were still hiding under the elderberries and not foraging and still gazing longingly through the fence at the geese. I don’t know, maybe they think the geese are really big ducks, and can protect them from a hostile world.

If they are not going to forage the garden, then we might have a problem. So we bought some all-flock feed but also put our thinking caps on to figure out if there was a way we could overcome their fear and get them out into the garden.

One thought was to move the duckmobile up on the project list, so they could be enclosed, but still mobile. The other was too put the geese in the garden with the ducks, and maybe they would be inspired to move out.

We decided to try a duckmobile. The first task we undertook was putting together our manufactured laying boxes. The thought was that we could use them in a duckmobile, for ease and cleanliness of egg harvesting. However, as it turns out, it is not a good fit for ducks. Apart from being cheaply designed and constructed, the egg collecting doors are on the wrong side. They are supposed to be roosts as well as covers, but ducks don’t need to roost and we want to collect the eggs from the outside of the mobile, not the inside. It would require some modification to put it into a duckmobile, although we may end up doing that.

Then we took a break for lunch and did some research. The main reason for not moving the geese into the garden area is that we still have lots of food in the garden, most specifically the winter wheat, which is now about 5-8 inches tall. Now, winter wheat can accept some grazing pressure. In fact, it is supposed to increase the root density and encourage it to put out more tillers for spring. However, I don’t want the geese nibbling it down to the ground, like they did in the pasture. Once we got some parameters for how much we want it grazed (down to about 3 inches) we decided it was okay to move the geese into the garden.

The results were almost immediate. They geese thought the garden grass was the best stuff since sliced bread. Hopefully they can graze down around the raspberries for us. If that works well, and we can come up with a way to protect tender young crops, we will pulse them through the garden every few weeks next spring to keep the grass down around the berries.

Even more impressive, the geese had no sooner gone through the gates than the ducks started casually working their way around the fence from the elderberries to see what these newcomers were up to.

Why open the gate, when you can just climb over it?

5 minutes later the ducks had moved out into the open and were busily foraging around in the grass. An hour later they had moved clear to the other side of the garden.

I don’t quite grasp the duck psychology. The geese have absolutely no use for ducks, or any other birds whatsoever. The gander drove the ducks away at least once, but there you have it. The ducks are encouraged by the presence of the geese. So we’ll watch that set up and see how it works for the next week or so, then maybe try to get them acclimatized to a duckmobile.