Relaxed Farming - our farm in your classroom

Sunshine today - hooray!! And everything was outside enjoying it - even better!
(Although no news on our dairy goat kidding...)
And so to our ducks that we promised we would mention a couple of days ago. As said, all three (Pear, Orange and Banana) are now laying eggs again after their winter break and as we want to raise lots of ducklings again this year we are NOT collecting the eggs, but instead leaving them in the nest boxes. This should (fingers crossed), encourage the three girls to go broody and so start to sit on the eggs in order to hatch them. Muscovies are unlike most other domesticated ducks in that they make fabulous mothers, and as long as you give them enough space, they will look after their brood of ducklings with virtually no human intervention needed at all. Last year (when Apple was still with us) the four of them raised almost 50 ducklings in total, taking them all round the smallholding in order to forage and find food. It was brilliant to watch.
We now have nine eggs split between two nest boxes although today only one new one was added so we hope that two of the three ducks have not found somewhere else to lay that we don't know about. We need them to go broody in one of the houses and NOT outside under a bush somewhere, otherwise Mr Fox will have a tasty meal one night!!!
Usually the ducks go broody when they have around 15 or so eggs so we are probably looking at a fortnight at least before any of them starts to sit. It takes 31 days (more or less) for Muscovy eggs to hatch so with any luck by the end of April we MAY have a few ducklings. As ever, we will keep you posted!