I have a blog…oh yeah! The thing I remember a few times a year. Can someone please remind my mom brain to actually POST THINGS. I swear I take photos and have every intention of keeping my blog up to date and time and time again I fail. I furthermore blame #momlife.
If you follow me on Instagram you know that we got ducks and you also know how obsessed I am with them, even though they don’t even remote feel the same in return. I’ll win them over some day. Can I also say how amazing ducks have been for egg production? I love my chickens, but they are extremely finicky when it comes to laying. Lack of treats, free ranging, sunlight, clean bedding, molting, you name it, they won’t lay. All of my ducks have been laying one egg every single morning since 6 months old. We have an insane amount of duck eggs piled up in our kitchen. Luckily we all love the taste so we make use of them almost daily.
But with ducks, or any type of farm animal comes housing, and preferably one predator proof! We have all sorts of critters on the island, the main one being our dog ;). We did a lot of research before building the coop and ultimately decided on doing a slightly different variation of a coop we found through Carolina Coops, which is an awesome custom company, just totally out of our price range. Unlike chickens, ducks do not need a roost for sleeping, they prefer to sleep huddled together on the ground. So we built them a little attached hut to their run where they lay eggs and shelter.
The walk in run we made as big as possible so they could have plenty of room to roam during the day without getting snatched by an eagle. We have doors from both our house side and garden side which is extremely convenient. I will say the one downfall to ducks, as everyone else will say…they are MESSY. Letting the ground just be a ground won’t do it. We added “gorilla mulch” and it lasted about a week and then got real mucky again. I think the next step will be adding a layer of sand for smell and drainage and topping it off with more mulch. If you are up for the work and dedication they require I say it’s well worth it!
Ducks require two important things every single day…clean water and “grooming” bowls and fresh food. I keep the hose right out next to their coop for easy cleaning and refills. Our coop we have placed basically right outside our master bedroom deck so it’s pretty easy to pop out there and do my daily chores.
I could talk ducks all day but here’s what you really want to see…the finished coop! Oh also, it 100% does NOT look like this anymore. As you can probably tell, this is before we placed the ducklings in here! But man do I miss this cleanliness! Farm life has definitely been good for my chilling out my OCD.
This is where the ducks sleep and lay their eggs! Reid designed this portion of it so well. The roof lifts up and clips onto the run for easy cleaning and egg gathering. We also added this super cheap waterproof laminate to protect the plywood from rotting out. We add either pine shavings or chopped straw on top of it for their bedding.
Please note the precious arched door Reid did for me! That boy knows the way to my heart. We also added these side windows where I put hardware cloth for extra protection while still allowing some ventilation to the coop.
This is a great picture to show the bones of it all. The ducks pen/shelter was built first and from there we added on the run. We did this a bit differently from the chicken coop but it has worked just as well! Those are 4x4s that were placed 24″ down in the dirt and filled with concrete. Reid built the doors on each side and once it was all assembled we were able to screw on the metal roofing. The final step was stretching and stapling the poultry netting around the perimeter of the run!
The white paint color we chose is White Dove by Benjamin Moore which is what the exterior of our house, chicken coop, pump house and garden shed are painted. The white definitely gets dirty in the coop but nothing a good pressure washing session can’t fix! All of our metal roofing is color Ash Grey.
Thanks for reading folks! We did so many projects over the summer I need to sit down and get photos organized to share on here. Let me know what you want to see next – flagstone fire-pit, garden shed, garage bathroom renovation, garden fencing… the options are endless! Until next time friends! 🙂
Sincerely,
Wild Willows Farm