Duck vaccillations
Original plan: Keep a mixed flock of ducks and chickens this winter to see whether it's true that waterfowl are better winter layers than land fowl.
Midsummer plan: Get rid of the ducks ASAP!
Late summer plan: Slaughter all the male ducks
(meaning we won't be raising waterfowl again next year), but keep the
girls for winter layers. Now that I treat the ducks like chickens (only giving them open water as a treat once a week
--- after all, it rains nearly every day), they're much easier to
handle. Sure, ducks don't forage as well as chickens on a
hillside, but the experiment is still worthy of carrying to its natural
conclusion...
...Especially since the
ducks are starting to lay! I found the first egg (slightly dirty
because we haven't built floor-level nest boxes yet) on Thursday and we
tasted it on Friday. The consensus was --- it tastes like an
egg. (By carefully eating bites of duck and chicken eggs side by
side, I could
detect a very slightly richer flavor in the former, but the difference
was very minor.) I'll be sure to report laying stats in a few
months once day length is at winter levels.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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HI Adrianna,
What breed of ducks do you have?