So today after discovering that my peas-that-have-not-germinated have and are leafless, we brought out the slug bait (Certified organic and safe (?!)...)......which works in a personal veggie garden, but on 3 acres of strawberries????
Truly sustainable and organic solution??
Ducks.
Hubby got online....usedcomoxvalley or something like that.....
We've got 6 khaki campbell ducklings arriving next week. I hope they're hungry!
Ducks love slugs. I hope they love LOTS of slugs. And I mean LOTS - at dusk the slugs just came out of everywhere, it's freaky....One staff strawberry picker we had carried each and every one off the field and saved them, others picked them into their "moldy" berry buckets and fed them to the pigs, slugs were a serious issue last year.
I chatted with the farmer providing us with the ducklings (ever tried to get OFF the phone when you're chatting with a farmer??) and I got an earful....I asked if they ate as many slugs as Indian Runners....he said "Well I don't have a slug problem..." I guess my question is answered then. He went on to say that they lay an egg a day every day of the year. His are free range but sleep in a small shed. They lay their eggs before he lets them out in the morning at 9. He herds them in at night and locks them in to prevent loss to predators.
Since my dogs appear to be chicken friendly now, (Thank you Joel Salatin, zapping collar appears to have worked after 2 training sessions.....) what's a few more birds running around the farm.....
Did I mention hubby ordered 50 broilers and 25 turkeys....arriving on the 30th....
We have..I mean he has to get building, we have some poultry sheds to get up and runnning...He's blaming me of course. I don't remember ordering them.....
On a side note we just moved the geese and chickens and it appears to stress them out. We aren't getting the geese eggs we were for awhile and the chickens laid 3 shellless eggs! One survived the fall and we ate it! Apparently they don't like being shut in and hauled to their new pasture......Research tells us it can also be put down to new layers and growing pains, but our best day was 9 eggs and today we only got 5, yesterday 3 and 3 shellless........so we think there is a link.
The ladies' new pasture is partly where the pigs were last year and I noticed that the ladies had eaten up some egg shell fragments left over from last years compost fed to the pigs.....so to be on the safe side I roasted up the eggshells I'd been putting to one side and ground them in the foodprocessor and spread them for the chickens - who gobbled them up.....So the extra calcium will be good I think.... Hubby thinks that if we'd had the birds since they were young and they were used to being moved it wouldn't be so stressfull to them.....
Isn't farming fun? Ask me in a month.
1 comment:
Some friends of ours just got thier new ducks for the slugs as well. They told fantastical stories about the previous ducks they owned that had slug slime drool hanging from thier beaks constantly... supposedly they were ravenous for the slugs! Hope you have luck with them!
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