Plants, ducks, and bees gone wild

Home.  There's nothing quite like it.  The housemates have been split across several continents for about the amount of time you might have noticed a lapse in blog posting, while Sasha and adopted housemate Natalie held down the fort.  Actually Lindsay is still gone, and can be found now and then here(if you havent checked it out already): www.healersbydesign.blogspot.com.

There is a brief window of priceless prospective upon returning home, that I have been enjoying the past few days, and could write plenty about.  

But for now I'll just say that I've enjoyed seeing all the changes here on this little piece of land, and seeing which plants have quadrupled in size while I've been away.  

The favas are especially thriving...

Sasha has been experimenting with letting the ducks loose on our sow bug infestation, and now they are happily enjoying free range of the entire backyard, which is fairly duck safe at the moment since we are focusing on getting 

 

perennials in and there aren't tasty new annual starts for them to nab.  Apparently ducks are able to forage a much greater percentage of their diet than chickens, and while we haven't quite put that theory to the test because we do buy them food, they do seem to be enjoying the free rein, and we are getting eggs again (though that is probably due more to light). 

And then there are our bees, who apparently have decided their old home was too small.  I think I'll save the story for the next post, but the short of it is that our bees swarmed yesterday, and then they swarmed again today... 

Our newest arrival

We have a new addition... today 5 indian runner ducks arrived, and stepped out of a pet carrier into their new home in the southeast corner of the backyard.  Besides being facinating and humorous, they are good layers (a greenish-colored egg a day/ per hen), and love to eat snails and slugs, which we have in abundance. They will certainly be an entertaining addition here.  There is one drake, (male duck) who is distinguished by his voice, a curled up tail, and a green bill, and 4 hens.  Let me know if you have good duck names to suggest!

The ducks came to us rather quickly because I happened to be biking by the eco house in Berkeley just a couple of weeks ago and the duck keeper was moving, and looking for a new home for his ducks.  So, finding plenty of material to harvest from our very yard, I built a pen, which is hopefully critter-proof.   It is built from old chain link fence that was unnecessary (double layers of fence along several walls), old chicken wire I happened to find just hanging on that back fence, and the door is built from a dead tree on the property, and scrap wood (again, from those boarded up windows... all that wood sure is coming in handy). It continues to amaze me just how much material we are able to put to use that was already here.  The beautiful guadua bamboo you see is part of a recent find- someone's old burning man project in the bay area that needed to go immediately, and we were the lucky recipients.

Other exciting non-duck happenings include: a productive greywater planning session with a greywater guerilla,  Sasha breaking ground on her pod and getting ready for starting the earth bag foundation this week, bamboo bike trailer building, prep for foundation work on the  granny unit that should begin this week, and a great party, thanks to all you amazing people that were here!