Well luv a duck!

Chooks I know a fair bit about. I've had them on and off for many years now so I always feel comfortable with what to do with them and in being around them. We have two lots, shavers, who are smaller than the meat birds like the Plymouth Barred Rocks we also have, but lay bigger eggs. They are also the ones who are the nosiest birds outside of the south island parrots. If there is something going on, they want to know all about it.
Which was the case a few Sundays ago when a chance comment made some weeks before resulting in an offer for some ducks came home to roost.
The woman in question had offered me some Khaki Campbell ducks at that time and I had thought, well, why not? Seeing as duck eggs are superb for cooking and many people prefer them to eat as opposed to chook eggs.
She turned up one Saturday not long after that and said, "Ok, my husband says I have too many - can you take them tomorrow? I'll catch them and bring them to you."
Of course I wasn't going to say no.
Luckily, Ken is like the magpies we have a lot of around here. He collects all kinds of things, shiny or not.
I often threaten to take it all to the dump, but he always tells me he'll find a use for it.
This was the case with some 900mm chain link fence and waratah standards.
In thinking back on how we made it, I am glad there was no one around with a video. He's pounding the tops of the standard with the biggest sledgehammer you ever saw (which bent one of them a bit!) and then I'm foot up on one, pulling the chain link fence as tight as I could - until Ken remembered he had some strainers in the container. So we got the little yard built, with the idea of them being in there until they got used to their space as home. We would then let them out into the orchard, once we have the hurricane fencing up to stop stray dogs from getting in and worrying them, the chooks and the sheep.
Then there was the question of shelter for them.
We had a HUGE old dog kennel Ken had built some years before, Now, those who know Ken will also know that he never does anything by halves. Why use a 2x2 when a 6x4 will make it stronger? (We will worry about lifting it later). That dog kennel used to house both our German shepherds - and Ken on a bad hair day. ;)
So we figured that it would make the perfect shelter. Ken ripped off the verandah and the front piece and put it in place, along with a deep bed of untreated wood shavings.
I wanted something for them to drink out of - I knew nothing about ducks, but figured, being water birds, they'd need something a bit better than the chook's fancy water basins.
I remembered an old plastic pond I had, so unearthed it, cleaned it and filled it with water.
We thought it all looked pretty good.
So too did the ducks when they arrived, honking and carrying on like their throats were about to be cut.

But they took to the shelter like it was a Hilton Hotel and, as I was to discover, in being mostly Khaki Campbells whom, I was told, don't fly and don't need water to swim in, suddenly found some genetic programming from somewhere which made them say "HEY! Pond! Swim!"
Which was truly funny, because it is only big enough for one duck to swim in at a time and the other two will peck at the one in it wanting it to get out so that they can squabble over whose turn it is next. They love it, even if it has turned into a headache for me in trying to keep the water clean. The bottom line is, you can't - I never knew ducks were such dirty beggars! An emptied, clean and fresh watered pond will last one day. They like to wash several times a day.

They are very talkative and Mum, who lives about 100 yards away and who is very deaf, can hear them when they are talking, which is either at feed time (chooks get fed first and the ducks know they are next) or when something is around the pen they think should not be.
In being told they can't fly, we've discovered it's more a case of they don't - but they can. We came out there one day and both the drake and one of the ducks were racing up and down the outside of the pen fence. In order to get them back in, because they were on the paddock side, not the home section side, we had to undo the back fence and herd them very gently back in, without letting the third duck out. It took 20 minutes, but we got there, so to circumvent them getting out again, we put strawberry netting over the top of the pen. Which is where the nosiness of the shavers came in - as Ken was standing in the chook pen on a bucket securing the higher part, the shavers were standing on his feet on the bucket, looking up as if to say, "What ARE you doing Dad?"

We are still waiting on an egg from the ducks...

Keeping up with the seasons

There is no getting away from the fact that having a lifestyle block is a fulltime job. Those from the city who think that it can be done on weekends either have a live-in manager on the property, have an acre 'ranch', or haven't bought one yet.
Ken decided, when we sold our home in Rotorua, that he'd retire; be a part-time painter and decorator. Because living half an hour our of the city meant there wouldn't be that much work. Surely. The ideal was that he could  do say, three to four jobs a year which would keep us ticking over nicely with my freelance work to fill in the gaps as it always does.
But, Murphy's Law being what it is, he has been busier with requests for his skills than he has been in a decade, since we got out here, with just two weeks around Christmas and two weeks this month.
So, into that four weeks he has had to pull up blackberry, gorse and broom (not much thankfully, just that which is coming over from the rear of some neighbouring sections along the main road, most of which are empty. He's had, as you would have seen, the hilarious fencing episode (and there is more to come on that front!) as well as fencing the housebus section. Plus, he's been the digger (aiding the planter, me) of more than 150 trees, painted the housebus and both containers, put up gates and dug trenches for waterlines.
Which is why he is so fond of telling me there would be few 20 year olds who could keep up with him lol!
But there is no getting away from the fact that in just over four months, we have come a very long way from the original bare block.
We now have seven potager gardens out the back, which is my province. And I do have tennis elbow now to show for it; each and every garden had a combination of sandy topsoil from the front paddock brought in wheelbarrow by excruciating wheelbarrow; (shovel by shovel!)  rotted down bark mulch/compost from the pile in the back paddock (ditto), two big bags of horse manure, two to three bags (or more) of potting mix and in the case of my asparagus beds, two or three old bags of seed mix. All of which had to be turned, raked and fertilised. Then all the railway sleepers had to be put in place, which I did one by one with the aid of a trolley dolly until I did my sciatic nerve in and Ken had to so the last garden edging.

But that was over in a few days and planting got in earnest after a week's settling time for each garden.
So here we are in the middle month of autumn and I have leeks, onions, cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, brussel sprouts, carrots, beetroot, spinach, silverbeet, lettuce growing very well indeed. As they need to be, because we now have 20 chooks and three ducks, all of which require bumper feeds of silverbeet and lettuce in addition to their kitchen scraps (not the ducks) and pellets.
The great big chook run is a blessing and it's thanks to our great mate Steve who built it for us, with Ken and I building the much smaller duck run beside it in a hurry when we were told they were arriving the following day! Thank heavens for upcycling, as we needed a shelter for them and the big, old dog kennel that I was eyeing up to go to the dump has been used instead.
Steve also built the deck both for the house bus and at Mum's place, which has made a huge difference to both sets of inhabitants.

Then of course, there has been the BIG Drought. Yes, I use capital letters for this most serious problem which affected all of New Zealand except for anyone who doesn't live on a farm or lifestyle block, or whose local council didn't have to put severe set of water restrictions. If it doesn't affect the economy, that will be sheer good luck.
What it meant for us though, was a lot of guilt. Our block is for some strange reason, zoned residential rather than rural. Probably because it used to be a council reserve that had been earmarked for subdivision back when the town had the big mill working. Either way, what that meant is that there is no water charges. (Yet, the council, which is 86 kms away, would love to charge us all!) Unlike those zoned rural, who must pay per cubic metre of water used.
Because I have a very young orchard of some 45 trees trying to grow in temperatures of 30C plus every day, in soil that is not the greatest owing to the pumice sand layer only a foot beneath the topsoil layer,  it meant hand watering each and every one of them every day. It also meant having the sprinklers going on the home lawn and the veggie garden.
What this did was create a haven of emerald green in the middle of everyone else's dead white remains of grass. And yes, we did get a few snide comments about it - but what can you do? If you have a benefit, you make the most of it.

Having said all that, we did feel for the local farmers, it has not been easy and those that did choose to use water for their stock really had to pay for it. For others, drying off the cows  early and selling excess stock were the only options they had.
I've had to learn to use the ride-on mower, which I cheerfully admit  frightens the crap out me me still; I'd much rather have the ancient one which did not go anywhere near as fast as this one does. I have visions of plowing through a fence at high speed! Ken does like to do it, but as he has little time these days, it falls to me quite often to try and find my way around the orchard without running over trees or hitting fence posts. Or trying to avoid hollows and holes that may tip the thing. *sigh*. Thankfully, the two front paddocks, with their rolling hill, small as it might be, is still too much for our mower and we use a professional mowing contractor for this.
There is a good reason for this; as we will not be putting stock in until next spring, the grass just grows and in the cutting of it, we provide organic fertiliser for the land.
We must have looked hilarious a couple of Sunday's ago. I knew there was rain coming that week and that we needed to get the grass seed sown in the big f ront paddock that had been pulled apart in the building of the driveway. The contractors had taken the sandy layer under the topsoil for the driveway base and as it was at the start of the drought, we knew there was no point in resowing it until autumn. With just two days rain in four months, even an autumn sowing was beginning to look dicey, but the weather service had warned of two big fronts coming in.
So on that Sunday morning, I am out there with a canvas carry bag (all I could find) slung over my neck and filled with ryegrass and clover seed. Striding along the paddock from side to side I used both hands like paddles to fling out the seed. It must have looked hilarious; Ken ended up using a small paint pot of seed to do the lower section by the road. So much so that our local transfer station manager came up the next day and in saying he had seen the spectacle, remembered he had an old seed distributor that one hung in front, wound the handle on the right hand side and the seed comes out the shute on the left hand side. This he very kindly donated to the cause! Next time we have to reseed, I will use it. As expected the rain arrived the next day and thankfully 10 days later, our unorthodox way of getting seed into the ground appears to have worked. Please note, the 'real' fertilising of the paddocks is done by a small truck lol!)