Daily routine

Our adult ducks live in our backyard, in a secure house at night and in a movable grazing pen during the day. The grazing pen has a baby pool, which they use in lieu of a pond for bathing. When we’re home during the day, we also give them some "free range" time to roam the backyard. The grazing pen gives them enough room to move around comfortably while keeping them from tearing up the yard or the garden. (See my notes on backyard pasture.)

We manage their routine so that the bulk of the work is in the evening; all we have to do in the morning is move them, give them fresh food, and collect the eggs. This is much easier when you have to work off the homestead during the day. In total, managing the ducks takes less than ten minutes in the morning and ten to fifteen minutes in the evening, unless it’s time to clean out their pen.

Backyard pasture for ducks

Raising poultry in the suburbs or in a rural backyard requires some unconventional thinking, both about your backyard and about sustainable livestock management. Our goal was to develop a system of rotational grazing that wouldn’t destroy our backyard. It’s been a success, if not a complete one; we always have a few bare patches at the back of the yard waiting new growth, but the ducks do well, and most of the yard stays usable for us. But see the update at the bottom of the page.

Duck house and run

New crib! The ducks moved into their new house in October 2003.

When we first got our ducks, we put them under our second-story deck at night for safety. This was secure and comfortable for them, but not entirely convenient for us, and not a very good long-term solution.

During the ducks’ second summer I built this house and run at the back of our yard.

Portable grazing pen for ducks

Livin’ large. Think of it as a duck playpen. (They do.)

I designed this grazing pen with several things in mind. It had to keep the ducks safe and content, it had to be portable, and it had to be easy to take apart so we could move it to the “real farm” (which, to date, we haven’t bought). And it had to look good enough to sit in the middle of the backyard. And not cost too much.

Duck food and water

We started the ducks on Mazuri waterfowl starter formula, and then switched them to Mazuri waterfowl breeder formula. They did great on the Mazuri breeder for five years, and then we began having supply problems. In the spring of 2007 I started buying Southern States layer pellets, and the ducks have done fine on that. It’s about $12 per 50 pounds as opposed to $25 for the Mazuri, and since they’re not laying the way they used to, I appreciate the savings. I can’t say, though, whether they’d have laid as well on the Southern States feed in their prime.

The Eightfold Agrarian Way

The “Eightfold Agrarian Way” is an outline of an agrarian philosophy for the twenty-first century. It is both a catalog and a prescription: a catalog, because it began as an attempt to find the common ground in three thousand years of agrarian thought; a prescription, because I believe that the philosophy I found is as valid for the future as its first authors thought it for the past. But it is only a beginning, a starting point for further discussion and debate.

Hobby farming

If part-time farmers want to be taken seriously, they have to take themselves seriously. It starts with a word.

Wildflowers

Originally published in The Northern Agrarian, April 2008.

In the woods behind my house is a clump of daffodils. Each year they emerge with the first false temptations of spring and for a few brief weeks throw bright yellow sparks from the still-brown floor of the forest, garishly urging the calendar onward. Then their blossoms wilt and return to the ground, and I forget about them.

I have lived in this house for ten years, and the woods in which the daffodils bloom are, in a legal sense, my woods. But I didn’t plant the daffodils, and I don’t know who did. In ten years I have barely set foot beyond the fence that encloses the back yard — a fence I built to keep in my dogs but which has fenced me in almost as effectively. The daffodils are at most twenty feet on the other side of the fence, and each year when they bloom I think I should tend them, or fertilze them, or plant more. Each year I do nothing.

This spring, for the first time, I squatted next to them for a closer look.

baby snowpeople

Let it snow. No, really

Saturday we had significant snowfall for the first time in four years: only an inch and a half, but enough that I no longer need fear that the Monkey will begin to think the stuff a fairy tale, like Santa Claus and supply-side economics. In a normal winter we get a little snow — seven-plus inches is the annual mean — but it hasn’t snowed as much as an inch since 2004. Having grown up with doorknob-high drifts and blanket forts on snow days and twice-layered jeans that soaked through sledding and left crimson cold burns on my thighs, I’ve had to lower my standards for “significant snowfall” these latter barren years. Now I get excited by flakes no bigger than my dog’s dandruff, and my daughter, having no standards at all, makes do with whatever she finds: the five inch-high snowperson adorning our porch rail attests to the determination of a child who can read chapter books about polar bears but has never set foot in snow deeper than the tread on her boots:

baby snowpeople

Sad, but one has to make do with what one has. I filled the bird feeders, gave the ducks fresh straw, checked to make sure I still owned a snow shovel, and settled in to enjoy the show. Even the basset hounds, who had never seen snow either, loved it — a clean slate for scents, I suppose — although if we get a real snow one day, I am going to have to knit poor Everett a jock strap.

puppy Everett

Welcome, Everett

We lost both our dogs last year, and although Sadie, the new girl, is a wonderful dog, a house isn’t a home without at least two basset hounds. And so:

puppy Everett

This guy happened to be available five days before Christmas, and so here is is. We named him Everett, after Ulysses Everett McGill in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, but should maybe have named him Marvin, as in Starvin’ Marvin, because he approaches a bowl of food like a Visigoth to Rome. When not hungrily eyeing herds of cattle he has a quiet confidence that I think will make him an excellent dog, and he seems to be pretty smart; at ten weeks old he will already sit on request. (Not “command” so much because he’s only ten weeks old, and also because he’s a basset hound.)

Sadie adores him and has played with him constantly, when she isn’t sleeping on the couch with him. They’re already Best Friends Forever. One dog is a pet; two and you really are sharing your home with another species. I missed that. Merry Christmas to me.