Duck Pond Aquaponic Experiment Update

Kale growing in Duck Pond Water

The duck pond has been filled and hosting 4 ducks for a couple of months. I messed around with several different options for filtering and growing plants before putting some kale plants and a strawberry plant in a 10' length of 4" PVC pipe.

That's working amazingly well. The kale went from seeds in rock wool starters to plants in a week. The plants drop a large root system into the water and grow quickly. They're significantly larger on a daily basis.

The pond went through various transformations since it was filled. It started off as clear, cold well water. Then once the ducks started swimming on it all the time, it bloomed with algae. Bacteria sucked up the nutrients and the algae died off, and finally the plants started  growing and cleaned up all the extraneous nitrates and nitrites from the water so now its actually pretty "clean".

As this season winds down it is more obvious what improvements would be beneficial for next year. It's also pretty obvious that this type of approach is really pretty efficient in terms of resources used.

A Half Wild Farm

Our second growing season here is wrapping up. I've got a much more concrete idea of what we're doing than I did when we started.

One idea that's on my mind lately is the people who settled northeast Ohio from the east coast really never figured out how to live here. Rather than adapt to and make the most of the new environment they were in, which was overflowing with natural abundance they literally razed it to the ground. They really wrecked it almost as throughly as they could given their population and technology. In the 70 or 100 years since they gave up farming on our little property, the damage persists. If they had known what they were doing would they have done anything different? I think so. 

This area around Big Creek is really distinctinctive. Thanks to the parks all along the creek and up to the lake, there's a lot of habitat for animals and plants. My current thought is to try to have a half wild farm where the native animals and plants--the flora and fauna that are best suited and complementary to the climate and landscape here--are complementary to our activities. 

Cover Crops versus Nutsedge

This seasons (2018) garden has developed a new "problem"--nutsedge. The plants produce tubers fairly quickly, so pulling out the plant is typically insufficient to kill it off.

My approach to weeds this season has been to try to smother them with cover crops, which can be easier said than done. When I can get the cover crops established, e.g. white clover or sudangrass, they take off and can easily outcompete things like nutsedge. If they don't get established, the nutsedge and other weeds takes over.

Another problem I have to solve with this approach is mowing or trimming back the cover crops stuns them and lets the weeds start to pop up again. If you don't cut the cover crops back, though, they'll end up swallowing the plants you're trying to grow.

In areas where the cover crops dominate, there's no nutsedge. The plants are stunted, then die off. So my current approach is:

• don't disturb the soil (that lets the weeds get established)
• bury/smother cover crops to make planting space

We need a border/buffer zone around the garden where it blends into the regular lawn, so reformatting the garden will start in the fall probably.

Duck Pen Build

Our hobby farm is starting to shape up. My current thought is it will be feasible for us to find some market niche and have a viable second income from it over the next few years. What's the niche? I don't really know. So at this point, we're still doing all of these projects as a hobby.

I built a duck pen over the course of a few months. The whole process was pretty interesting. I got an agriculture use zoning variance from my township zoning inspector this spring, then started sinking 4x6 pressure treated posts for the fence.

Since I started this build in early spring (mud season) I couldn't use a skid steer post hole auger, since it's too heavy and would get stuck in the yard, so I used an "Earthquake" 1 or 2 man 2 cycle engine auger to drill the post holes. (22 of them) That portion of the project was hugely labor intensive. Had I used a skid-steer auger it would have taken a couple of hours. Instead, it took multiple days of multi-hour sessions of back straining effort.

Once the posts were in I actually was able to use a rented Kubota tractor to dig out a pond for the ducks and dig trenches for the water and electric lines. The Kubota is all-around useful, but pretty bad for specific tasks. A tracked excavator would have been much, much better for digging the trench. I really probably needed two machines--an excavator and a skid steer with a bucket.

Once the lines were in I fenced in the enclosure. That was a pretty large undertaking as well. I did the fence in segments between the posts rather than running a few stringers all the way around the enclosure and mounting the fence to that. My initial concept was to build them in the shop and transport them outside, but I ended up building all of them in place. That ended up being very labor intensive with many operations per segment, but I think it looks a lot prettier and more interesting than if I had done something simpler. It follows the contour of the landscape while still being like a "building" versus a fence.

Finally, I built a little 5x8' coop for the ducks. When I do a project like this, I like to try out some techniques and materials I might like to use on a larger scale. For example, on the duck house, I did board & batten siding with pine to get a feel for the expense and difficulties associated with that type of siding for the house. I think it ended up looking nice and should be easy to maintain over time. It's probably affordable if I used our own lumber instead of buying it. I also did some stuff like use copper trims and flashing and did some homebuilt windows.

The ducks are our first farm animals. We started off with 4, which ended up being 2 females and 2 males. They seem to be at-ease most of the time, and enjoy their lives. Currently the pond is being used to provide fertilizer water and to run a test aquaponic system. We'll see how everything holds up over the winter and see how our little flock does in their house.

It seems like next spring we should be able to double the size of the flock without causing any major stress to the troupe we've already got.