Bees N Blooms now has ducks! Our farm, being organic, needed a safe and natural way to control pests such as caterpillars, beetles, and most of all, slugs. Slugs are abundant on the farm, especially after all the rain we have received, and make it difficult to plant. They hide during the day and in dry summer months, and come out at night and in moist, cool seasons like our recent winter months. The slug density in the field is very high—about 20 slugs per square foot—and they can literally destroy small seedlings over the course of several nights. For a small area, it is possible to go out at night and pick the slugs off the plants or trap them under boards, but for an acre and a half, that is just not feasible. We did the hand-picking for the vegetable garden and ended up with several GALLONS of slugs (and a sore back from bending over to pick them!). This is why we have chosen a pest control system called mob grazing, using ducks.
Mob Grazing is a planned grazing in which livestock is confined to a specific area. They graze in the confined area, which clears out pests and trims down vegetation. Once they have grazed in the first area, they are moved to the next. Bees N Blooms is having the ducks graze in specific areas to prepare the land for organic cut flower production, ridding the area of the pesky slugs and the caterpillars we have been seeing lately. Ducks are great slug-eaters and are just the right height for hunting them!
The ducks arrived on the farm on February 24th and were introduced to their new grazing area. We brought a few chickens down to the pen as well. They’ve been scratching at the dirt and uncovering some slugs, while the ducks watch and trample the ground with their large, webbed feet. The chickens, however, are more picky about what they eat, so once the chickens uncover the slugs, the ducks have at them.
As you can see in the above pictures, the ducks and chickens have made short work of the vegetation, slugs and caterpillars in the pen and are just about ready to be moved to a new grazing area.
After the ducks are moved, we’ll get busy putting compost down and broadforking the area to loosen up the soil a bit, but no real tilling. The first flowers to go in the ground are the bulbs—Allium, Crocosmia, and Callas, followed shortly by the hundreds of seedlings in the nursery, including milkweed (Ascelpas), purple coneflower (Echinacea), and Lion’s Tail (Leonotis leonurus) seedlings. Spring is almost here!
