Circle M Farm

In our quest to employ ever more heat lamps on the farm during this chilly spring, we’ve just brought home 6 adorable Black Cayuga ducklings from Farm and Fleet. These are to be our garden guardians and slug clean-up crew as soon as they are feathered and big enough to handle the weather.

The ducklings have just been plucked out of a tiny warm cardboard box and placed in their new home – a stock tank in front of our woodstove. This duck pile is how they stay warm when chilled, and how they seek comfort when surprised. If they’d been raised with their mom, these two-day olds would take cover under her wings and breast many times a day. Instead, they are constantly trying to get under each other!

I ordered the ducklings way back in February, in a fit of optimism and poultry envy. I’d been looking in the heritage bird catalogs for meat chickens and ended up adding ducks and turkeys to the order. They’re all just so adorable, and fun to have waddling around the place.

I’d been mulling over the concept of garden ducks for several years, actually, inspired by Eliot Coleman’s glowing recommendation in The Four Season Harvest, an absolute necessity on my bookshelf. His idea is to have a little herd of ducks patrol the perimeter of the gardens to eradicate slugs and other pests, and to toss them into the gardens for clean up now and then. We’ve got the pigs to do most of our tilling work, so I thought I might as well farm out some more work to ducks. We’ll see how the experiment works. I’m skeptical that the poop will be worth the help they give, but I am excited about harvesting their blue-grey eggs. Cayugas actually lay more prolifically than chickens.

And who can resist a fuzzy black baby?