Matthew Aspinwall

I'm in Rockdale, off i-20 on the other side of Atlanta.

There's a spring half a mile from our well. The well is about 100 feet deep. We run it through two filters and some water softening salts.

Two or three times a year it will start to get a little sulfur smell that does not affect the taste. When that happens we shock the water - see https://aces.nmsu.edu/pubs/_m/M115/welcome.html

Beyond that, quality is great.

Female muscovies are pretty different from mallard derived ducks. If you clip their wing feathers they should be fine, but otherwise they definitely can jump that fence easy.

It might be a bit claustrophobic. They are social animals and prefer the company of a few other ducks. Too many in that space might be fairly compact, but if it is just for slug hunting duty they should be okay with a larger area to roam.

Any reason you can't fence the veggie patch in and let them free-range the entire area outside it?

Depends on the breed, but my ducks don't really fly or jump. They might flap their wings to help them get over a small slope, but none of them from the small Welsh Harlequin to the chunky Pekin is able or willing to jump a meter high.

Jocelyn Campbell wrote:

Matthew Aspinwall wrote:Found this growing on my property in October. Monotropa uniflora (ghost plant or Indian pipe). It has no chlorophyll, instead getting it's energy from mycorrhizal fungi. The flower tips were slightly pink and you could smell them from yards away.

A good, floral smell?

Gorgeous photo!

Yup! Very pleasant. I would have put them in a vase, but I wanted them to go to seed.

Found this growing on my property in October. Monotropa uniflora (ghost plant or Indian pipe). It has no chlorophyll, instead getting it's energy from mycorrhizal fungi. The flower tips were slightly pink and you could smell them from yards away.

Apparently difficult to come by as the seeds need to land in just the right spot, so we left them in the hopes that they will keep popping up around the place.