T Melville learns how (not?) to raise chickens on a budget.

I would totally love to know more about your duckweed system.

I don't have a pond so I haven't considered it, but if you are pulling it off with an IBC pond... is it difficult?

Timothy Norton wrote:I would totally love to know more about your duckweed system.

I don't have a pond so I haven't considered it, but if you are pulling it off with an IBC pond... is it difficult?

I'm not having any great success, but near where I live I found somewhere I can occasionally get it for free. It survives in my tote, but usually doesn't multiply very fast. The weather seems to be a factor, it seems to multiply faster when it's warm. My totes are just inside my barn. In the summer they get full sun on about the southernmost foot. I suspect you'd have better success in full sun. The only nutrients mine get are from fish waste, and I think I could use more of that. In a pond, nutrients would also probably come from the soil. Goldfish eat it. I think koi and our local minnows do too. My system has three totes, so I put the duckweed in one with no fish.

I suspect most of what I dried was grown where I collected it, rather than in my operation.

It's still too early to brag, I'm afraid, but I'm starting to have some success. So, if it's not dumb luck, then my breakthrough is this:

I originally set up the two painted totes, the (now) outside ones, and stocked them with fish. I added the middle, unpainted one later. When I found duckweed, I put it in the middle, unstocked tote. (I added crawdads/ crawfish/ crayfish later, but that didn't really work out. I haven't seen them in about two years.) It just couldn't out-compete the algae that looks like green hair (I call it hair algae.) or the sub-surface water plant (I've seen similar in pictures labelled hornwort.) that I guess I must've brought with it. Snails, too, but the plants don't seem to mind them. The first year I did pretty much nothing. The next, I started trying to remove the hair algae and hornwort. I couldn't get ahead without wiping out everything. Some of the hair algae floated and tangled with the duckweed. It also grew along the bottom and sides and tangled in the PVC fittings I threw in there for crawdads to hide in. I couldn't get it all without taking out all the duckweed. I thought several times that I got all the hornwort, but it just kept coming back. So near the end of summer I got an idea. I dipped all the fish out of tank one and put them in tank three. Then I picked out individual duckweed plants one by one. I inspected them for traces of the other plants. Of course, I didn't find hornwort on them. If I found hair algae I couldn't separate (rinsing in tank two water) then I dried those plants for future use. Only the cleanest got transferred to tank one. I estimate I was able to salvage a dozen or so. I decided if this wasn't the cure, then it wasn't meant to be, I was gonna let it fail until such time as I came up with a totally different idea. I took four or five fish from tank three and put them in tank two, in hopes they'd eat all the plants in there. Tank one is still fishless.

Time will tell how well this will work, but it's starting to show promise. If it goes ahead and gets full, I think I'll try setting up some tank(s) indoors under lights.

So I got sick and didn't get to the barn for a few days. Okay, maybe I'm learning how to do this...

It got so thick I fed a little to the fish and took some to the house for the chickens.

For what it's worth, I read somewhere that duckweed likes very still water. My system from last year and before had no pump. Any movement was from wind. Somehow I got in my head that movement might discourage mosquitos and algae. I don't even know if that's correct, but I tried it. In the interest of my duckweed, I opted for minimal disturbance. I have in the bottom of the tank a cheap (~$20) harbor freight pump. It's adapted to pump through a garden hose, which returns into a salvaged bit of pipe at about 45° very near the water surface. Almost no splashing, but a very gentle clockwise current. (The bit of pipe was meant to be below the surface, and is for a short while right after I top up. If the splashing seemed to bother the duckweed, I'd salvage a longer bit.)

Finally got a mobile outdoor enclosure "built". It was an old two family rabbit cage we were given a long time ago. The divider's been removed, so it's one "room". I spent the last few days overhauling it to be more predator tight and replacing the ½" X 1" floor with 1" X 1". I feel like they don't have room enough to get far from the walls if attacked, so it's "Day Camp" and they come back in at night. They've only been out once. They're still a little uptight, but I think it's growing on 'em.

Is the predator pressure so high even in the day? I used to keep my 3 weeks old chicks inside circled chicken wire but now at 8 weeks they are all running free. With this small cage, I would be worrying about them knocking the feeder and waterer over or getting too hot in the heat of summer.

May Lotito wrote:Is the predator pressure so high even in the day? I used to keep my 3 weeks old chicks inside circled chicken wire but now at 8 weeks they are all running free. With this small cage, I would be worrying about them knocking the feeder and waterer over or getting too hot in the heat of summer.

The predator pressure is usually pretty low, but it varies. I'm trying to be prepared for worse than I expect. On one occasion in the past, we were slowly losing our free range ducks to predators. Then we found where our last female hid a nest and was sitting on about 20 eggs. We moved her and the nest into this same cage, minus the improvements I've made in the last few days. Something scared her badly enough that she got out without getting the lids/ door open. The doors and the surface they close against both flexed too much. I don't remember if eggs had hatched and ducklings were taken, or eggs were taken, (before hatching started) but we lost all but about 5. We never found proof, but snake makes sense to me.

I want these guys to eat grass and bugs. I know they need more than just grass, and I plan to keep supplementing with layer crumbles. Since they're still coming in at night, I just give it free choice inside. (I gave them something today to encourage searching and scratching. I found an old can and put enough cat food in it to cover the bottom, then enough dog food to cover that, 1 cup layer crumbles and a big handful of sunflower seeds. I dumped that all over the cage for them to track down.) Today I found a way to use the same water bottle they use inside, mounted on top of the cage, and pretty hard to knock over.





I also added a cover to keep rain off.



Since they're new to outside and are used to heating and air conditioning, I've started them under the shade of our big old maple tree. (Plus here they're easy to check on from the front door!)

So I head to bed last night and the cover is hanging off one side of the brooder, there's crap in the floor and a hen in my bed. With that disclosed, if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go have words with past me for not having that tractor ready...