We were thinking about having chickens for a while. The previous owner of our house was an older lady who had chickens for as long anyone could remember. She also kept ducks. When I asked my neighbor "A" (her daughter in law) why she had the ducks together with the chickens, I was told that it was just because "Mam" liked ducks as well. A. told me she and her husband bought Mam a lovely pair of white ducks once. When one of the ducks was run over by a tractor from Mam's brother, he bought her a new duck without telling her. It was a greyish/brownish type of duck. When she asked Mam about the different color in ducks, Mam told her that she had those ducks from the beginning and there was no new duck and they had always had that color....
It was a funny story but for me it didn't explain the presence of the ducks in a chicken coop. I started looking on the internet for the combination of chickens and ducks. I found out that when you don't want a rooster (and I really don't want that because of the crowing early in the morning) you can get ducks for keeping the order among the chickens. The chickens will stay more calm with a duck in their flock. They won't peck each other as much when a duck is there. I thought it was a bonus that ducks lay eggs as well so we decided to buy a duck with the chickens.
We restored the outside chicken run first. It was really falling to pieces. The poles were rotten just above ground and were held up by the chicken wire.
Disassembling the fence was work for a day. We kept the parts that were still sort of ok and re-used them for the "new" fence. First of all D.(husband) and I sawed the wood for the fence. Youngest daughter C.(11) took up a hammer as well and we restored it together.
For digging the holes for the poles (rhyming....lalalalala) we used a spade and a crowbar to get through the stones and pebbles that were in the ground. A pair of work gloves were worn out when D. (husband) took the soil/pebbles/stones out by hand. We finally did it. Putting up the fences and the poles took another three days.
The chicken-wire we used on top of the fence to make it higher was a leftover roll we found in one of the sheds around our house. It took another day to put that up and put in a fence-door so we can go in and out as well. Might come in handy one day... I thought the chickens and the duck would appreciate a bit of a jungle in their coop so we kept most of the fireweed and the nettles. I took some of it out so they have pathways and won't be needing a machete when they want to walk around.
C. (11) said it would be nice to dig a hole for a pond so the duck could swim. I really didn't want a pond as such. The work involved keeping a duck pond clean didn't appeal to me one bit. She found the perfect alternative: a bathtub that was in one of the sheds has a nice pea-green color and should be easy to empty out and fill up. So we dug the hole for that together with son F. (9).
We cleaned out the chicken shed and made sure they had some straw, a water tray and a small pan for food. We were ready just in time for the Street festival where I knew there would be chickens for sale. And hopefully a duck.
