I
always get a kick out of the first pullet egg of the year.  In
2014, our young ladies started their productive careers at 18 weeks of
age, seven days younger than when I wrote this post a couple of years ago about when to expect your first eggs.



I liked this shot because Mark captured our new rain barrel
as well as the tiny egg.  Rain barrels aren’t really
chicken-related…except that this barrel has been primarily used for
filling buckets of water to carry to the chicken coop.  It’s
astonishing how many steps a rain barrel can save over the course of
just a few weeks.  If you’re sick of carrying water, adding a rain barrel near (or on) your chicken coop can make your life much easier!

Around the beginning of July, it was as if a flip was switched within our little ponds — the duckweed
started growing like crazy!  Our ducks are too big to be worth
moving back to the ponds to dine, so I figured — why not bring the
duckweed to them?  It only took me a couple of minutes to scoop up
about a gallon of duckweed, tadpoles, and water bugs, and after the
ducks realized the bucket wasn’t going to bite, they dived in with
relish.  Within minutes, every bit of greenery was gone.

I wrote last week that our ducks are too lazy to produce good-quality eggs since they don’t forage much. 
However, my duckweed bucket suggests that I’m just not embracing the
duckness of ducks (as Joel Salatin would say).  Although you can raise waterfowl on dry land,
that’s not the role they’re best suited for.  Perhaps a bucket of
duckweed a few times a week is a happy compromise that will keep our
ducks healthy and make them a more sustainable part of the homestead?