Slug Success

Well I know in the past I've complained about my mother....but today she really came through for us.

She showed up with a bucket of slugs. 200 of them in fact....Why she counted I have no idea. More on this later.....

We headed out to the guck tractor. And started throwing them in.

Huh! What's this??

Can you say GOBBLE, and not the turkey kind?

WAHOO!!!

Shake and Swallow, visit the water to help, slime o rama, YUMMY!

Only 170 to eat before we run out......

Oh Say Can You Say .....Slugcess??!!

Which reminds me of a time in my young life that I remember. I was about 4 or 5 and we lived in Vancouver with a green area in front of our house. There were a lot of slugs there and I guess I must have mentionned this fact to my mom.... My mom and a friend were a bit "lit up" to say the least and they said "If you get 100 slugs we'll eat them.....shellless escargot!" So out I march (and I can remember flashes of this vividly...) and get 100 slugs in a bucket....and bring them in....My mom's version is that they slugs were crawling out everywhere....Well I guess I must have gone to bed at this point because now I only remember my mom's retelling of the story. Basically they boiled the slugs and ended up with a pot full of slime and slugs....not entirely appetizing. As the red wine was flowing they decided to BLEND the slugs and eat them on toast, and this is EXACTLY what they did. Slug Pate.

Yup that's my mother, she'll eat anything.

I have a lot more mom stories.....

Poultry Update

I thought I'd do a little update on the various feathered members of our farm family....

Big guys working on newly planted strawberry field....EAT THE WEEDS!!!! Our 14 big guys are free range on the farm. I see them walking up and down aisles munching away. We have to figure out how to fence them once strawberry season starts! They have LARGE poops. As the Manitoba Farmer lady described them to me "Processed grass with a bit of icing sugar on top" She neglected to mention they are close to dog poop size! I can imagine they might turn a few customers off even though they are not stinky at all, they are seriously JUST GRASS!

Lucy is sitting on 6 eggs in her goose barn - 2 are hers and 4 we stuck in a week later (When we found a nest in the cover crop) We've got to be careful and try and remove the two eggs that are further along to hatch out in the house and let her keep the 4 later ones.....or the other way around, we haven't got that far! We're looking forward to the goslings though!

The girls are laying 12-14 eggs a day and we are still getting a large double yolker every day, we love the eggs and at this point aren't managing to accumulate any to sell, but we are saving money on purchased farm fresh eggs.....

Broilers: The inflato chickens are inflating. They are almost 4 weeks old and are pretty big now. Hubby had to modify our brooder room - we added another 4x8 sheet of flooring and gave the chickens and turkeys each a section.

We are readying an outdoor fenced area for them to roam. We're not sure how much they will roam, but the option will be there. The soil isn't so good so I'm picturing the soil being improved with copious quantities of chicken poop, cover crops being planted in between broiler batches which the next batch can then munch down.....We built the fenced area so the tractor can get in if necessary. (Not planned, the wire fencing ran out so hubby made a modification that turned out to be a tractor gate-brilliant!) Our weather is unseasonably cold and we can't let the turkeys out until it's 20 degrees out (70)....

Turkeys: They are CHARACTERS. One sits in the feeder and eats. If we leave the top gate open they are checking out how they can escape......They have a funny gobble-cheep right now and are acting like turkeys with their wings and tails. They are inquisitive and remind me of raptors on Jurrassic park - especially with the sounds they make...I bet the developer of the raptors had heard turkeys! I can only describe it as a turkey purr! WE have to figure out where to build a permanent pen/shelter for them but the nights are still a bit cold for them....

DUCKLINGS/Weeder Geese: I LOVE LOVE LOVE THEM! My guys can munch through about 5 buckets of chopped greens a day now. They chow it down! I REALLY want them to develope a liking for creeping clover, devils thumbprint and other pesky weeds.....They are not tame, but will come for me if I bend over and talk to them. They are outside all day every day now in their duck tractor which we move every two days. They seem pretty happy! I've thrown in slugs but have yet to positively see a duck down one. EAT THE DANG SLUGS!

I call it a guck tractor - goose + duck - And truly the guck they produce in one day is amazing! Hopefully our lawn grows well behind them! It's the only part of our lawn that is mowed....with all the rain we've been having getting anything mowed or ploughed is a bit of a challenge right now!

We have a "Duck house" that we put them in at night....an old coffee kiosk we bought off craigslist and converted....This will be where the ducks are trained to go at night so we can get their eggs.....but somewhere out on the range, not on the driveway in front of the barn.....We want them to be free range once strawberry season is over....We're not sure yet about the chinese geese going in at night....must explore options!

Did I mention we're behind in the strawberry farming work?

The pigs arrive the day after tomorrow......

Poultry farm?

What would you do if you had a slug problem? Like a serious slug problem. Last summer we had a problem with botrytis (mold) on our strawberries. The slugs were part of the reason...they travel from berry to berry sampling, sampling and spreading....
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.