From the noise of the main road,
the neighbours so close you can touch their windows from yours,
from being minutes away from shops..
to a house in the country so nice I still can't believe we live in it.
It's still a rental, but we have no need (currently anyway) to own the place we inhabit.
And with a view this good
I'd rather just enjoy this place while we have it
(just.. ignore the state of the grass...!)
It's quiet and private, the stars light up the sky on a clear night. It's everything you could want, there's even an old aviary at the top of the driveway. At first that was a bit run down, no birds have lived there for years that's for sure! we are told it was for storage, and seemed mostly to hold up what I think may have been the worlds biggest grapevine.
'Cool story about an old shed' I hear you say sarcastically, but I had high hopes for it
the shed (minus grapevine and roof debris)
'Can you think of any reasons I shouldn't get chickens?' I asked my brother, full of hope.
He wasn't overly excited about it, neither seemed miss A, but they and the property owner agreed
I was going to get the chickens I'd wanted for years!
and a duck... shhh
After consulting a local breeder (poultry Valley in NZ if you are wondering, it's great. I'd recommend it!), I was placed on a waiting list. Ducks from her were hatched naturally in the spring, which worked out well actually, it gave me plenty of time to work on the coop, research brooding and raising birds and read about poultry illness until I was so worried about home bumble foot surgery, worms, Mareks disease etc. that I considered not answering the 'your birds have been born!' email.
But as the time drew closer I grew so increasingly frustrated with the absence of 'your birds have been born!' emails that I knew it was inevitable we would soon be over run by fluffy butts.
And then it came
'ducklings have been born over the last few days, are you still interested?' Heck yes I was.
On the 17th of October 2015 we arrived home with a box of (indignant) tiny birds, 6 laced Wyandotte chickie babes and 4 Buff Orpington ducklings
there are *6* chicks in this box. I can't for the life of me figure out where number 6 is at this point
A straight run of each, boys and girls. 'We'll eat, sell or give away all the boys' I said (sure, sure).
It's been an interesting run so far! I certainly didn't expect it to be as easy as 'food goes in chicken face, egg comes out, everyone's happy!' but... It's quite a bit harder than I thought, a steep learning curve definitely!
There's been ups and downs, happy peepers and illness, the weirdness of young teenage duck love and a heck of a lot of googling...
for the first couple of weeks mostly I was worried about sexing them, what if they are all little boys? then it moved on to other things, what does green poop mean? can I really free range the ducks? will they always live happily together?
and as I'm discovering, there isn't a huge amount of information for ducks, especially buff ducks
so, let's make a blog about it! 20 weeks of poultry ownership hardly makes me an expert, but if nothing else maybe, just maybe someone will see something I write and find it helpful. Or maybe this will be a great blog about what not to do..
Hopefully it won't be that last one
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