Duck Tales

Our new pets, hoping I'll feed them three hours early.

Since I started this blog, we acquired 6 ducks. These are pets which joined us at the age of 4 weeks and are now around 11 weeks. In theory they could start laying eggs in another couple of months.

Part of me is terrified. What will we do with them all? We suspect we have 3 females and 3 drakes but can't be sure for another few weeks yet when the final moult into adult plumage finishes.

They are Indian runner ducks. In theory each female could lay up to 200 eggs a year. That's a total of 600 eggs.
In the meantime, we have had issues with the pond and with eating crops.

We tried protecting the beans with fleece. They tore it down.

Everyone says don't let them in your pond. How bad can it be? we thought.

In 3 days our little pond became a stinking cesspit. I emptied half the water out and refilled it but it was still a stinking cesspit.

We had to purchase a pump and biofilter, both larger than usually needed for our size of pond. Within three days it stopped pumping and we had to clean unimaginable amounts of gunk off the filters. Two weeks later the same thing happened.

It's too late to unshow the ducks where the pond is, so we'll have to live with flushing the filters through regularly. Fortunately we bought a filter with a valve with a 'clean' function on it, so we don't have to dismantle everything every time.

The picture above is what is left of our runner beans. The ducks ate the bottom 3 feet of leaves. They like borlotti bean leaves and flowers too and have stripped the plants and trampled them. Fortunately this didn't affect the crop which was well advanced when we got the birds. They strip kale and chard, too.

Chard remains

They've worked out how to make holes in the fleece we have put over other beds with seedlings in. This morning I found them with their heads in a rip eating our next rocket crop. I'm pretty sure there wasn't a rip there yesterday.

But I wouldn't change them. They are such fun and very calming to watch.

We'll overcome the greens issue somehow.