Digging Holes and Discipling Ducks (Part One)

**Head's UP! This is part one of a two part blog post.***

Hello again! I feel like the title should be Digging Ditches and Discipling Ducks, which makes for a better alliteration but my sense of truth is stronger than my love of alliteration. Because it's not a ditch, as you will see, but an actual hole. But before we get into the hole, let's deal with these dastardly ducks.... (see what I did there? HA!)

The worst offender by far is Peter. He was named after the titular character in the story Peter and the Wolf. (Yes I know it's the little boy who is named Peter and originally the duck didn't have a name until Disney gave him- her, actually- the name of Sonia. But he's a duck and what does he care about semantics?) Anyway, he behaves more like Peter the Great, claiming as much territory as possible. He even started claiming Atticus and then Wiley. Those of you who know Wiley can imagine how well that went over.... And although Wiley has had to school the ducks many times on the basics of appropriate behavior, #1 being "Never EVER sneak up on Wiley"; they never learn and rarely give up for long.

Up until recently I've ignored my little baryard Czar and watched in amusement as he led his flock all over the place while they all make loud proclamations, form and disband committees and register general complaints to anyone they spy. Unfortunately for Peter, he has started to think I'm free for playing the "I dominate YOU" game. The ducks do it to each other and the guineas and the dogs. Curiously, they give the cats a very wide birth. They still quack at the cats, but keep as far away from their neighbors as possible. (The duck coop and cat barn share a wall) Which doesn't make sense to me. The dogs are much bigger and so wouldn't you think they'd be the scary ones to the ducks? The cats are the same size as the ducks.

Anyhow- when Peter started charging me in an aggressive manner a few weeks ago, I went online to find out how to stop this behavior. Turns out, the advice is just as strange and centered around sex as everything else about ducks is.. are... whatever.


Look at the photos below:

I told him his humiliation would be public. He cares not! Look at that diabolically defiant gleam in his beady little eye!

Ducks are so soft but have really strong necks.

Ok, so let me explain. Yes, I am simulating mounting my duck. The theory goes as follows: You have a dominate drake in the flock who isn't satisfied with bullying the other ducks and animals on the farm. Now he wants to dominate you too, and starts to nip at your pant legs and charge at you menacingly. You could ignore this- after all, he's only about 5 lbs of feathers and noise. But if you do, and you have shorts on, or a small child is visiting the farm to enjoy the wonders of farm animals, he'll go after your bare legs and then your friend's little kid too. Now you've got a welt and your friend's kid not only has a welt- ON HER FACE BECAUSE DUCKS ARE TALL AND CHILDREN ARE SHORT- but has now been traumatized for life and they won't come back and visit and they'll go tell everyone what an asshole you are and what a jerk your ducks are.

So your options are limited. You could re-home the drake, in which case he'll probably become someone's dinner. You could kill him and eat him yourself. Or you can first try to modify the behavior by reminding your special little tyrant who the real Queen of the land is. And to do that, you gotta mount that duck for a solid 5 minutes. You will have to repeat this activity on a daily basis. Multiple times.

There's actually one other thing that I can do... and that's get a bunch more females. The flock is imbalanced for sure, and there's a lot of homosexual stuff going on, which is great because that means the one female, Penelope, doesn't have to bear the brunt of all the attention. But having more females around will chill the boys out. I do plan to get more, I just need to make some space in the coop.

Now for the ditch that is actually a hole.

In the aquaponics system, if you recall, we have two grow bed styles. One is water based with floats for the plants and the other is medium based with clay balls. So the medium based grow bed is also what is called and "ebb and flow" style. It's great for bigger plants like tomatoes. So to make this work correctly, we needed to install a cistern that is below the water line for the grow bed. That means digging a big ass hole. Here are some photos and videos with notes about what you are seeing.

Here is Aaron on the excavator we rented. 

Beginning to dig. As it turned out, this was not the best spot for digging so this hole had to be filled back up and we moved the operation just past this towards the pool. I asked Aaron if he was having fun. He said, "Yeah! This is a childhood fantasy come true!" 

So naturally, he dug the hole WAYYY too big.

 What's a cistern you ask? Well it's a big tank that you hold water in. They come in different sizes and shapes. 

Here is ours:

The semi had just left after dropping off this tank. It's only about 175 lbs. 

Even though it's not too heavy, the tractor was used to move it for speed, ease and to minimize the chance that it would get damaged.

I'm sort of going out of order here, because we got the cistern the day before Aaron started digging the hole. Here's a video of some of that:

So once the hole was dug, we had to put the sand in. It took two truck loads to fill the bottom of the hole. 

Then it rained just before we could put the cistern in. 

Here's the video:

The rain made the whole area into a sticky mud mess worthy of the best summer outdoor concert event.

Atticus loved it.

The ducks loved it more.

So now that the hole was dug and we got a ton of rain, we realized that back filling the hole with the soil we dug up was not the best choice. Aaron had the brilliant idea of getting a dump truck load of gravel delivered. We'll use it to fill up around the cistern but we also need it for around the farm. We have decided we need a lot of gravel paths around the farm after this particularly wet winter and spring. 

Here's the video of that:

Next up in Part Two: The Search for More Time..... we'll have trench digging, pipe laying, seeds growing like crazy and of course, dogs.