Just yesterday, we were telling Garth’s mom what a relief it was that the chickens are old enough to require less work now. We have elevated their foods and [...]]]> Cross-posted from our temporary farm blog.
(Not everything will be cross-posted; farm blog RSS is here. Eventually will move to a real domain, but we’ll let you know.)
______

Just yesterday, we were telling Garth’s mom what a relief it was that the chickens are old enough to require less work now. We have elevated their foods and waters off the ground a bit, so they don’t scratch so much pine shavings into them. We have given them a bit of dowel to perch on, and we upgraded them from the bottom half of a dog crate, to the two halves of a dog crate zip-tied together (classy).

So it was sort of ironic (Garth says: “less ironic than a pain in the ass”) that he called me frantically from the feed store late this afternoon to tell me that they had four Khaki Campbell ducklings, exactly the breed we have been looking for. They were two females and two males. We wanted three or four females for eggs, and would take a male just to hang out (and breed, maybe, given the hard time we had finding these ducklings). Two males and two females is way different from the ratio we had hoped for, but the prospect of leaving one poor little boy duckling behind in the duckling bucket, all alone, was just not even an option. So Garth brought home four little ducklings, two boys and two girls.

For now they are in the chicks’ old galvanized tub, washed out (thanks Garth!) with vinegar. They are already displaying very different behavior from the chicks; they run and splash in the water, going in circles with one foot in the waterer.

So at this point we are looking at a future average of:
6 chickens = ~28 eggs/week
2 lady ducks = ~10-12 eggs/week

Yay!

More duckling pictures at flickr.