old thread, but one thing the wife and I were considering for this coming year is setting up an old kennel as a run and keeping ducks…we were hoping the kennel (it is a “clamp panels together” affair) would be solid enough we could drag it a kennel-length across the yard every few days to let them forage, as well as letting them out periodically.
The one thing we were really thinking of was that if we could affix Japanese beetle baits (2-3 of them) to the top of the kennel, hopefully the birds would learn to keep an eye out for falling insects as they dropped, essentially switching out the ducks for at least one of the disgusting stinky trap-bags in the yard…the first couple weeks this year we filled the entire trap bag like twice…
ducks and geese are much better than chickens in a orchard setting. they don’t scratch the mulch everywhere and usually leave the plants alone. if i didn’t have chickens with them, i would let my ducks and geese out daily to graze and fertilize my yard.
We had problems with muscovy and geese figuring out that the germinating beans in the adjacent field made a tasty snack. They would walk a row and pull every plant. Sad to report that they didn’t survive to test my patience further.
they will eat new growth but usually leave it alone once a little bigger. the wild canadians love the recently cut oat fields here esp. once the left over oats start to germinate. some fields have hundreds of geese in them in oct.!
Reviving this thread to share the setup I have settled on with my ducks in the orchard. I have them in an all metal tractor/mobile pen I built out of salvaged aluminum tent poles, wire fencing and metal roofing that they stay in for the warmer spring-summer-fall months (they stay in the barn for the winter).
I move them every morning and allow them to intensively graze the strip tightly against each orchard row. This accomplishes a few things, it keeps the grass and weeds down next to my trees and shrubs cutting down on mowing, drops nitrogen right where it’s needed in my young establishing orchard without me having to even touch the shovel, and I don’t have to worry about putting them in and out daily to avoid predation etc.
Here are a few pics I took after the heavy rains last night, good thing ducks don’t mind water!
Interesting… Those ducks don’t mind being enclosed in such a small space? Our ducks rove around our whole farm (pooping everywhere and eating --presumably-- bugs). I can’t attest to any actual benefit to the orchard, since they’re not IN the orchard all that often, but we feed them almost nothing during the growing season, they make a gazillion eggs, and they’re highly entertaining.
