Twenty of the twenty two duck eggs that we put in the incubator hatched this week! I tried a different approach with them. Normally, I feel pretty locked in to the 24 hour window with hatching. That is to say, after 24 hours in the incubator chicks/ducklings need to come out so that they can get a drink of water etc. Germs and bacteria build up quickly once they start to hatch and poop outside of the eggs. And if you open the incubator to take some out then usually the humidity drops and the egg sac stiffens so that any who haven't hatched yet have very little chance of breaking out.
Normally, we lock down the incubator 3 days before hatch day. This group started hatching very early though! There were still 4 days left on the incubator timer when the first duckling pipped. I had to quickly stop the automatic turner and remove the tray. (In hindsight, I wish that I would have left the tray in place. The first duckling to pip got too cold or too dried out from opening the incubator all the way to shift the tray out).
The hatching was spread out over almost 3 days. After the first 24 hours there were about 12 ducklings ready to go into the brooder. I just opened the incubator a crack and carefully pulled out each duckling pausing to make sure that the heat and humidity levels were not changing much. That allowed the other 8 slower eggs time to hatch. The incubator was very stinky after 3 days of hatching, but ducklings are very sturdy compared to chicks and turkeys. None of them seem to have gotten sick.
Nineteen are Silver Appleyard and one muscovy snuck an egg in there.
I started advertising them for sale two days after they were born and in less than a week all are sold and there's a waiting list for the next batch! I sold them for 10$ each.
My little garden buddy entertaining himself. He does not like to keep his hat on, but the tight cinched toggle helps it stay.
The garden is loving the rainy weather we had this week.
The first strawberry blossoms are open!
The new way of deep mulching the strawberries worked pretty well. I wish that the plants had come up more thickly. Maybe they will over the course of the season. It did a good job smothering the weeds so far though.
Our little pea seedlings are coming up strong. A little more reaching and they'll be climbing their trellis.
My Red Lake currant bush is coming in as are the cuttings that I propagated from it.
My little espaliered apple tree might fruit this year! Probably not since it might need a closer buddy for pollination... working on that. It's not as pretty as the ones we saw in Villandry, but I am pretty proud of how well it is going since I was just guessing on how to train it.
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