Transcript from video:

Courtney Brooke: Hey Uncle Zev. What are you doing?

Zev: Oh, hey! I’m  emptying out this liquid duck gold.

Courtney Brooke: Duck gold?

Zev: Yes.

Courtney Brooke: What does that mean?

Zev: An unspoken treasure. This is our duck water from the sweet ducks. The ancona ducks have been swimming in here the last week About once a week we empty this out and spread this water around to different plants that need it, with its beautiful phosphorus and all the nitrogen and nutrients in there and the duck oils which make this cool rainbow colored oily skim on the top and feed all the plants with it. It’s one of the amazing yields of the ducks. Along with the eggs, and their manure, and their beauty and companionship, and bug eating, we get fertigation water. So that’s what I’m doing. Fertigation…. fertilize your irrigation. It’s like saying wave irrigating in ways that are also fertilizing the plants because of everything i just said.

Courtney Brooke: So do you recommend having ducks?

Zev: Definitely yeah

Courtney Brooke: Who do you recommend having ducks? Why? who should have ducks?

Zev: Well probably people who have a few other companions, a few other crew to do it with. Once I had ducks by myself, when I lived in someone’s backyard in a salvaged metal and earthen building I built. That meant that if I ever went away for the night or was just really tired or something then it was always like “oh god, I gotta go deal with the ducks” or get someone to duck sit the ducks. But if you got a few compadres and comadres then somebody can take care of them when somebody else goes.

So, people who have a little crew, and who have a little diversified landscape. Especially where you can rotate them through different areas. Different paddocks, kind of mini paddocks and rotate them through the garden at the right time when they’re not going to trample teensy plants. Rotate them through the forest garden and around the mushroom logs when the mushrooms are coming out so that they eat the slugs before they damage the mushrooms and around the house to eat the termites. So a diversified landscape, home scale is one of the ways ducks fit really good.

Also, people in traditional Asian cultures use them in big large scale rice paddies. So they’re all manner of things. The trick is, that we didn’t do here yet, is to have the water they swim and be high in the landscape so you can use gravity to get fertigation water to other points. So, this is currently down here for convenience and that’s a little inconvenient.

Courtney Brooke: Hey ducks!

Zev: There’s six of them but there’s only five here because one of them’s in there right now sitting on eggs breeding. They’re hopefully going to hatch out into a new round little ducklings.

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Thirteen Hut Hamlet neighbors recently established a chicken co-op, endearingly referred to as Posse Poulet. From these 50 or so birds, we have been receiving almost all of our needed eggs, and we’re looking ahead to a possible moderate increase in number of birds, including some ducks. We’ll also be slaughtering some of the older hens this fall for stew.

Working together, we get an integrated rotational chicken system with a manageable workload and cost for each household, as well as the fun of collaborating. We purchased 45 laying hens from Imani Farm (who decided to reduce their flock this year) and received several hens and another two roosters (one is now digested soup) from Black Wolf. With the financial structure and roles within the co-op set up by last spring, we made the leap and purchased equipment (such as electric fencing, materials for a moveable coop and feed containers) and then the birds in June. Since then, they’ve been rotated through three overgrown agricultural areas in the neighborhood. One of the areas the chickens cleared was around the House of Oneness, which will be deconstructed this season and salvaged for reconstruction as the House of Diversity in the Village Center (see related article in this newsletter).

Kimchi, another co-operative in the coop co-op, writes: “The chicken co-op has been a great way to experience and expand our connections with the land, the source of our food, and learn how to share with each other. What a gift to create rich relationships at Earthaven!”

We’ve also been experimenting with “alternative feed systems” such as black soldier fly larvae and red wiggler worm production, and of course we feed all of our seedy weeds to the birds, thus reducing weed pressure in our compost piles and giving nutrients to the birds. We’ve also been experimenting with using charcoal in their pen, nesting boxes and roost to absorb manure nutrients and odor and create biochar.

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Living in Hawk Holler neighborhood presents its own set of challenges. With only one house and two people living here so far, the main inhabitants are the four-legged, winged ones, and creepy crawly varieties. What to do when these creatures begin to multiply and take over the gardens, threaten the chickens and ducks, leaving little to eat from our hard work?

My answer was to call on the first domesticated animal for help. Yep. The dog. A dog owner for most of my life and experienced with several working breeds, I chose the English Shepherd, also known as the Farm Collie. This breed, familiar from the 1800’s to the 1940’s, began to disappear along with small farms during the industrial farming revolution. Still a rare breed, and one that fortunately is not AKC registered, it is being re-established by some extremely savvy small farmers.

Aggie the farm dog at Hawk Holler has in her heritage hundreds of years of service including hunting, vermin eradicating, herding, and guarding the flock. A few of her chores are: keeping the deer and others out of the garden, rounding up chickens and ducks when needed, and helping with vole, mouse and rat control. She keeps critters out of the chicken house, sniffs out hidden eggs and brings them to me (yes in her mouth, whole), and brings in firewood. And her favorite: watching over the baby chicks and ducklings. She’s one smart dog who took a few years of commitment to train, but is so worth the effort.

 Rae Jean has always lived on the edge one way or another. For the last seven years it has been at Earthaven. Along with raising heritage chickens, ducks, veggies and herbs she designs and creates knitting patterns.

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