your Qs, my As - part one
your Qs, my As - part one
June edition
Thank you for all of the great questions! Here’s part one of this month’s Q&As. In this episode we talk raising ducks, chickens, electrolytes, adaptogens, and more (including what to watch out for if you’re buying medicinal mushroom blends).
These Q&As are offered as a perk to paid members, but I’m opening up part one to all so you can decide for yourself if you think you might like to sign up for a paid subscription. Part two includes conversation around salt, snacking ideas for kids, sheep, meat rabbits, sunbathing, milk cows, and a myriad of other things that find their way into my brain and out of my mouth. I hope there’s some good little bits in here for all.
Part two has been sent to all paid subscribers.
Follow up resources to this portion of the Q&As:
A great foundational book to get you learning more about adaptogens.
Electrolyte blend we use in 2 litres water: 1/2 tsp salt, 1/4 tsp potassium (we only add this if we think we need it), a magnesium capsule (not all the time).
This is the electrolyte Troy buys as a treat every now and then.
This is a great article that expands on what I touched on regarding medicinal mushroom mycelium vs. the fruiting body. Most of what is sold commercially by the big mushroom purveyors is a blend of grain substrate and mycelium. Not at all ideal.
And, below, is the picture of my mite-free chicken house thanks to the wonderful spiders therein.
your Qs, my As - part one
Good morning Tara! Well - after listening to your essays religiously, finally something that we might not agree on entirely. Last year we got our first Pekin (not Peking) ducklings. We'd been raising chickens for years but wanted to add some of this delicious protein to our diets as well and had never raised ducks before. We also wanted to have a source of protein that we could reproduce easily. So, last March we picked up our 10 ducklings and we raised them until we could distinguish the hens from the drakes. We processed two drakes and kept two drakes and six hens over the winter. The big surprise to us was what prolific egg layers they were! Over the course of the winter we averaged almost 5 gorgeous big eggs every day from our six hens. No lights, no roosts, less feed than our chickens, easy to herd into their enclosure at night. Last month we ran our first round of eggs through our incubator. 100% fertility and 85% successfully hatched. We have another round in the incubators now, due to hatch next week. At 8 weeks we will process most of these birds as that's the optimal time to avoid pinfeathers and they don't put on much size after that. They will dress out at about 6lbs. We don't have a dedicated pond. We have large kiddy pools that we put drains in so we just pull the plug, rinse and refill daily (that water is pure gold to the surrounding area). We are encouraging many local farms to consider Pekin Ducks as a great addition to their food security plan.
I liked your details about how and why you raise your ducks. Much appreciated. So interesting about the spiders in your barns and coops. Oh my! It makes sense and now I am kicking myself because I just used permectrin on my chickens to get rid of bad lice and also because I had the mites last year.. I wish I hadn’t of sprayed the coop down as I know it will deter spiders too which is now NOT what I want😞. I am learning. But I am not sure how to turn that around. Without using the stuff to get rid of lice. The other thing I am going to try is putting more dry sand so they can dust bath which I know helps reduce parasites. Thanks for the helpful info!