A delicate little flower

This is a blog about the newest member of our duck flock. Her name is Flower -- because she's a delicate little flower.

As you all know by now, Anna is a veterinarian.  Flower was bought by a family as an Easter present to their kids (that's a topic for another post) and was brought to the clinic where Anna works to be euthanized because she had a twisted neck.  Twisted neck can happen with improper diet, vitamin deficiency, toxicity, or more serious diseases.  When Anna found out about Flower, she knew she had to bring her to our farm.  If she could show us that she's capable of eating and living a normal life, there's no reason for her to be euthanized.

Here's what Flower looked like on day 1 with us.  She's probably about 2 weeks old in this photo. We were hopeful that increasing her vitamins would help her to straighten her neck out -- that and telling her regularly to "put your head on straight!"  She came with that teddy, and after we put it on the ground, she snuggled it nightly….adorable.

After a few days of having Flower at our house, Anna got some bad news.  When the previous owners got her, her neck was already like this.  She was only a couple days old at that point, and all the other ducklings with her were fine.  This made us pretty nervous that increasing her vitamins and bettering her diet wouldn't be enough.  We started preparing ourselves for having a very special needs duck, and if she proved to be unable to live a happy, healthy life, we were preparing ourselves for the tough decision to go ahead with the euthanasia.

So, we worked out a daily vitamin/greens routine which she enjoyed thoroughly.  Ducklings LOVE fresh greens -- I often feel like there should be some sort of signage a local ponds telling people to stop throwing bread and start throwing salad. We gave her water with some vitamins A, E, and B, and we added nutritional yeast to her food for more vitamin B -- B is a big one for duckling development and the main ingredient that commercial chick starter food (for chickens) is lacking.

Flower taking a break from greens and vitamins….still crooked. :\

Mmmmm….greeeeeeeens!

You can see that her neck is getting a little less crooked, but it still isn't quite right, and she still has some pretty severe episodes.  We started taking her outside with us if we were working in the garden or somewhere where she'd be protected from the dogs and we could keep an eye on her.  Outside, she was really good.  Her neck was pretty normal most of the time…unless she got stressed out. If we walked too far away from her, she would get really stressed, start freaking out, get twisted upside down, start stumbling backwards…it wasn't good.

Here's a video of Flower doing well in the garden with Anna in her early days.  You can see that her head is looking better but is definitely a little crooked still.

Filmed that same day -- one of her not so good moments. Anna stopped filming once she really started freaking out, but you get the idea.

At this point, she'd been with us for about a week and a half, and we were beginning to wonder if she was going to get better.  She was showing improvement, but she still wasn't as good as we would have liked.  Within a few days, however, she started getting better and better, and her episodes of upside-downness were getting fewer and fewer.  Given that she's a duck, we knew that if she was going to be fully integrated with our flock, she would need to be able to swim.  We decided to put her in the bath tub to check out her swimming abilities.  It wasn't pretty the first few times.  She freaked out, turned her head upside down and swam in backwards circles.  Upside down head in the water = no breathing.  Not good.  We really wanted to see if she could swim, so we kept at it.  We'd put her in the tub with enough water for her to stand so she didn't have to swim if she didn't want to.  Eventually, she got more and more comfortable in the water, and one day she just did it!  She started swimming happy laps around the tub splashing, bathing, and being a generally happy duck.

Since then, she's just gotten better and better.  I don't remember the last time she had an upside down neck moment.

Eventually, she got too big and the splashing got to be too much for the counter, so vitamin time got moved to the sink.  Her neck is MUCH better here!

Napping with the farm manager while we were doing some planting.

She's now been with us about 3 weeks, and we've been starting to give her a lot of unsupervised outside time.  We have a poultry seclusion pen -- we use it for new birds, sick birds, etc.  She's been spending almost every day that the weather's nice out there -- she doesn't quite have enough big girl feathers to spend rainy days outside yet.  Downy feathers + rain = waterlogged, chilly, unhappy duckling.  We've also been giving her supervised time with the entire flock -- adult ducks and teenager chickens.  They're definitely interested in her, but they haven't been too overly aggressive.  At first, she was pretty wary of going in the pond with the big girls, but she found a somewhat secluded corner of the pond and started swimming and dabbling at the greens we tossed in.  Within a few days, she took the big plunge into the middle of the pond and started swimming with her new friends.

Today, she's having her first unsupervised time with the flock -- though, admittedly, we keep looking out the window at her.  Some of the chickens are paying her a bit more attention than we'd like, but she's holding her own.  Naturally, we had to photo/video document the occasion.

Looking good!  Strutting her stuff in the yard.

Checking out the camera. Yep, it's adorable.

Look at that happy duckling.  Give her a few more weeks (and some more feathers!), and she's going to be with the full flock all the time.

Oh, I forgot to mention one more ridiculously adorable thing that happened as we were raising her. Any time she was out and about with us...

Yeah, that never gets old.  We're really looking forward to watching her grow into an adult duck.  Based on her voice, it appears that she is, indeed, a female.  We think she's a Pekin duck, so we'll have another decent layer in our flock.

We're really glad we adopted her, and we're even more glad she recovered so quickly and easily.  All she needed was proper nutrition. What a lucky duck! I couldn't help myself.

Your life will descend into chaos.

One thing they don't tell you about farming/homesteading -- your life will descend into total chaos.  It is completely unavoidable, at least at this stage of the game, and this Type-A, left-brained, organizer finds it hard to handle sometimes.

Here are a few examples:

1. The garage is a mess, we'll clean/organize it once we move the chicken tractor out. Chicken tractor moved out. The garage is a mess, we'll clean/organize it once the rain barrels are all put together and moved out. Garage is still a mess and housing the rain barrels.

2. Rain barrels need to be put together so we can harvest the rain to water our crops.  But, wait, if we don't plant our crops now it's going to be too late. But, wait, it's raining, and the barrels are overflowing with no over flow spout. But wait….the seeds!

3. The ground is frozen, but we need to start seedlings. No problem, do it in the basement and get soil/water all over the floor. It's ok that there's soil/water on the floor because it is already covered with wood scraps. It's ok that the floor is covered with wood scraps because we're raising 20 baby birds in the basement and there are pine shavings all over the place too….and it smells like poultry poop.

4. New special needs duckling needs a home?  No problem, we have a guest bedroom for that.  What? Guests are coming?  No problem, clean out the shavings and cover up the poultry smell (thanks, incense), and move the baby into your bedroom. Again, with the pine shavings.

5. Piles and piles of cardboard and newspaper for sheet mulching (again, with the disastrous garage) are  just lying around -- but this is useful stuff, people!  We can't recycle it in any way other than putting it on the ground.  As soon as we harvest truck load after truck load of seaweed from our river, then we'll do the sheet mulching.  But wait, we need to sheet mulch to plant the seedlings in our expanded beds. But wait, we need to plant the seedlings really soon!

6. High tunnel construction -- this is an entire blog post or two in itself.  Let's get it done in the fall so we can use the tunnel all winter and have early spring crops.  What?  The ground froze?  Crap.  So, the high tunnel stands incomplete like someone flipping me the bird every time I look at it.  But now it's spring, and we can finish construction so we can plant our seedlings in the tunnel!  It's raining?  Crap.  Well, at least the rain barrels are….crap.

You get the idea.  I'm not complaining -- I'm merely pointing out our reality.  Rest assured, this is just the tip of the iceberg.  I didn't even begin to touch on the things that need to be done in our house -- screens on the windows, vacuuming/mopping up the mess made by 3 dogs during mud season/spring shedding, actually cleaning something instead of just wiping it down, and I don't know, actually dusting for once in our lives.

And we don't even have kids!

I should end this post by saying that I do love our life, and I feel extremely fortunate to be able to live this way.  Sometimes, I just can't handle the piles of crap and disorganization.  I know it will get better over time as we figure things out and develop efficient/organized systems, but for now, I'm just going to do my best to breathe through it. :)

Also -- I'm making a concerted effort to post more.  So, there may be some posts sans pictures, but I'll do my best to put them as frequently as possible.

No till tilling

While we did decide to till the garden last year, we are not going to do it ever again.

There are things one can do to avoid tilling, and the long term effects of tilling are actually quite detrimental to the soil. Most people will tell you that they till to avoid weeds and enrich the soil.  The first year you till your land, it will produce an incredibly rich and bountiful crop.  In subsequent years, however, things won't be so great without a lot of amendments -- tilling exposes the precious topsoil resulting in topsoil loss and nutrient depletion.  As far as weeds go, there are lots of dormant weed seeds in the soil, and tilling simply brings them to to surface giving them the sun and air they need to grow.  They should thank us!

I'm not implying that tilling is some evil empire of agricultural practices, but for us, it isn't something we want to do.  For larger scale operations, it may be unavoidable, but on our scale, we're trying to avoid it. As I mentioned before, if you till, you'll need to add amendments to maintain fertile land, so why not skip the extra step and simply build soil from the ground up.

Many people claim that no-dig practices don't work and you end up with compacted soil.  This parsnip grew at a friend's house in Maine -- clearly there's no compaction there!  She's been building the soil without digging or tilling for years, and look at this bounty!  Credit: Lisa Fernandes.

Our plan is to use permaculture techniques to build soil that will get better every year.  Why simply go for sustainable (status quo) when you can make something better than how you found it?

One of the techniques we're using to improve our soil involves letting our chickens to the "tilling" work. :)  The jury is still out for us on whether or not we are going to get organic certified, so we can still do this.  If we go the organic certification route, we can't put our chickens directly on our veggie bed, but for now we're happy to have them eat weed seeds, spread manure, and generally stir things around.

In order for them to do this, they need a temporary and mobile home -- enter the chicken tractor.  It's a mobile home that we built for them that we'll move around the field.  And now, a photo montage…

Cheapo bike tires that are going to make our tractor mobile.  We ended up replacing the tubes and tires because they didn't hold air for crap.  

The bottom frame -- we struggled with how to attach the tires, but you'll see below that we figured it out quite nicely.

Oliver is always on hand for scale. :)  Bike tires need two points of attachment or they wobble all over the place.  With this setup, they are pretty secure and sturdy.

Dr. Trafton thinks it is a really good idea to ride the frame down the hill into our field.  I made her wear the helmet.

Dr. Knapp, however, thinks this is a supremely bad idea since there are no breaks and no ability to steer.  Here's what happened...

We have a floor, people.  Olive and Oliver were clearly more interested in a squirrel than being scale models.

Wall frames are up!  

…and we have a chicken door!  

We started building this in the fall, and this was our beautiful view.  Not too shabby!

Walls, big door, and more.  All we need now is a roof!

Here's the inside -- roosts and the nest boxes will go on the top ledge there.  Clearly, we built this entire thing from scrap wood we had lying around.

I heard a lot of flapping coming from the chicken yard, and this is what I found.  Wing clipping followed shortly thereafter.  Don't worry, it is just like cutting a fingernail, there is no pain involved.

Fast forward to now -- we got a corrugated plastic roof, and Dr. Trafton put it on.  Add some temporary fencing with a solar powered electric charger to keep dogs and other animals out, and the ladies are enjoying their first days on the veggie bed.  Naturally, we had to observe them for a little bit to make sure they weren't going to jump out or the dogs weren't going to try to get in.  The only dog to attempt getting in thus far is Baxter….shocker.  He learned his lesson and won't be trying it again any time soon.  Oliver is, obviously, on hand for supervising and keeping everyone in line.

Here's a better view of everything from our deck.  They worked the bed like champs, and we have since moved them to the perimeter of the bed where they're eating weed seeds.  We're going to swap out chickens for ducks once the seedlings are in the ground so they can work slug patrol.  

This is what was happening during our supervising.  This guy is such a snuggler, it is borderline ridiculous.  Please note his little smile. :)

…and then we attempted a family portrait...

So, we're really pleased with how quickly the chickens can work things over.  We're hoping to try to keep moving them around the field, especially where we've planted fruit trees.  It is our hope that we won't have to mow these areas, and we can keep to only mowing the very lower part of the field where we have no trees around which we'd have to navigate.

Stay tuned for how it works...