Eggs and insect control

[Guest guest]

Indian runner ducks can lay upwards of 300 eggs a year, don't fly and

are considered quiet (I think they mean quiet for ducks). They eat a

lot of grass and are good foragers. I'm noticing my Indian runners

spend most of their mornings and evenings chasing mosquitoes out of

the grass and eating them. I was looking it up to see just how good

they are at mosquito control (we don't seem to have any this year)

and found this neat site:

http://journeytoforever.org/farm_poultry.html

Check it out it says:

High-protein poultry feed from thin air

Lots of flies around? Collect some kitchen slops -- cooking water and

juices and leftovers from meat and fish dishes, some milk: anything

that will go really putrid if you leave it for awhile. Then leave it

for awhile. When it stinks really badly, gather some compost

materials, say 4-5 cubic feet, spread it out in the sun, and sprinkle

it with the putrid kitchen liquids. Don't get it too wet -- slightly

more wet than compost should be.

In no time it'll be buzzing with flies. Leave it until you're quite

sure lots of flies have had ample opportunity to lay their fill of

eggs. Then scoop it all up, put it in a double garbage bag (one

inside the other), put the bag in a suitably sized cardboard box, and

close the bag lightly. It will soon stop smelling. Check it every day.

After a week or so, you'll open it to find the surface flat, finely

divided, and writhing slightly, or even considerably, with maggots,

lots and lots of maggots. Now's the time, don't leave them to turn

into flies. Two options:

Option 1

Sift it with a circular gardener's sieve with a 3/16 " mesh (stainless

steel mesh is best). This will leave you with a pile of nice black

compost and a sieve full of maggots -- first-class poultry feed. Your

chickens, ducks, guinea fowl will think it's Christmas. The geese,

who're strict vegetarians, will be appalled and disgusted by the

whole thing, but never mind. Add the siftings to the compost bin or

the worm bin. Maggots, by the way, assist rather than hinder the

composting process. And, disgusting as they may look, fly maggots do

not spread disease.

Option 2

Let the birds do the sifting for you -- but don't throw it onto their

bedding or the mulch in their run because they'll miss a few maggots,

leaving them to hatch into flies. On bare ground, they'll definitely

get them all.

You've just wiped out a generation of flies.

Instead of using liquids, you can let a couple of litres of kitchen

scraps get thoroughly putrid in a bucket with a lid on it and use

that instead.

See The Housefly by Professor Roy Hartenstein, online at the Journey

to Forever Small Farms Library.

Putting the Bluebottle Fly to Work -- from " Friend Earthworm:

Practical Application of a Lifetime Study of Habits of the Most

Important Animal in the World " by Sheffield Oliver, 1941,

online at the Journey to Forever Small Farms Library.

Poultry as unpaid labour

If you keep Muscovy ducks (you should!) there might not be enough

flies around to make a boxful of maggots for you.

A Canadian study of fly controls with dairy calves found that

Muscovies caught 30 times more houseflies than commercial flytraps,

baits or flypaper. The ducks also ate spilled feed so flies couldn't

breed in it.

The Heifer Project Exchange quotes a development worker in Togo in

Africa reporting that the local people were not bothered by flies

because their Muscovy ducks killed them all. They slaughtered some

ducks, opened the crops to see what they'd eaten, and each one was

filled with hundreds of flies. (ECHO)

Slugs and snails eating your salad greens? Old country lore

says: " There is no such thing as a surfeit of slugs, merely a dearth

of ducks. "

Particularly Khaki ducks, also Indian runners, though all

ducks are ace slug catchers, they'll even go after their eggs in the

soil. The ducks, though, might also appreciate your salad greens, so

you'll have to watch them.

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So if you're thinking of adding poultry to your household for eggs,

maybe consider ducks instead of chickens (who are also wonderful and

eat ticks). Or both, I guess!