water – Peacock Orchard

10 Duck Pond Ideas for your Homestead

If you have ducks, and you should, then supplying them with enough water is probably a problem you are facing. I am going to share a 10 simple ideas with you for solving your water problems.

1. A plastic kiddie pool. This is an easy, cheap way to supply your ducks with bountiful water. It needs emptied weekly at the very least, and that means wasting a lot of water. So unless you are able to funnel the water to say, an orchard, this idea may not be for you. Works great for pigs too.2. Half a dog kennel. This one seems a bit weird, right. Perhaps, but it works fantastically well. Easy entrance and exit for young ducks, doesn’t use too much water and is easy to clean. I used them until they cracked one winter.

3. Stock tank. Similar to the kiddy pool but sturdier the stock tank is a good solution if you are looking for larger solutions. They make metal and rubbermaid stock tanks. I have a sheep tank that worked just fine for a little while. Cleaning it out is a real problem. You also have to make sure there are blocks for the ducks to get in and out of the tank or they will drown.

4. Automatic Waterer. This is the ideal solution for limited space and water. This is also a great winter solution as some heat tape keeps the entire thing from freezing and you from hauling around a hose. This is a great solution for all animals on the farm but for me, it was all about the ducks and the huge mess they make.

5. Heated water bowl. Another solution for winter water this one is quite laborious for you as it requires hauling water out to it at least twice a day. I’ve done this more than one winter and survived to tell the tale. It’s still not ideal though.

6. Dig a duck pond and seal it with cement or a pond liner. This is an expensive option, but a superior one as far as longevity and enjoyment go. I was able to dig a 10x14x3 foot duck pond with the bucket of our Kubota tractor. The deeper portion I cemented and the smaller bio-filter portion of the pond was lined with pond liner. The cons to this pond are the cement cracking (which mind did the first winter) and the liner cracking (which mind also did that first winter). Cementing and sealing this pond were also really laborious.

7. Dig a duck pond and seal it with bentonite. Bentonite is a clay polymer that when mixed with regular dirt and compressed seals water into ponds and waterways. This is a great solution all around. It’s less expensive than cement and pond liners and their is no risk of cracking.

8. Dig a duck pond and gley it with pigs. This is my favorite option. It’s inexpensive and you get bacon when it is all done. What isn’t to love?

9. Filtering duck pond water. Plants are the best way to filter duck pond water. The problem is protecting those plants from the ducks. They are smarter than they look, or so I’ve found. After some trial and error I’ve found caging each plant individually to be the best way. I am perfectly happy with whatever grows out of the cages being consumed so long as the main plant is protected. So far, so good. Also make sure your pond is properly aerated either with a pump or an under water aerator.

10. Controlling pests in a duck pond. Bugs do love a good body of water to procreate in. Midge flies really really loved ours. The ducks weren’t eating them so the best and safest solution was goldfish. 100 goldfish released into the pond solved the problem in a single day and then fed the ducks.

Mini-Kraters and Swales handling winter melt

The temperatures are rising and our snow drifts are slowly melting. Snow harvesting was a wild success this year. If you’ve followed any previous posts than you know that the snow is a problem for our driveway but the melt is the real nightmare. Our driveway and road turn into a mud pit. So last summer we trenched with our new excavator and the results have been amazing!

That is one fabulously dry road!

The trenches are full and the area immediately around them is saturated, but the driveway has been maintained fabulously. So far. We’ll let you know if I’m still confident about our earth works after a heavy rain.

All of the water kept off the driveway is then trenched to various places. Our swales receive most of it but we also have some retention ponds that get rather full.

The swales harvested a tremendous amount of snow and that’s melting off right now.

The harvested snow was wonderful for both insulating our fruit trees and now for watering them. The ground around the swales is amazingly saturated.

The kraters (some more than others) are still really full of snow. About 1-2′.

They are holding strong and I couldn’t be more pleased with our decision to dig them!

A downside of such heavy snow harvest is that the trees can be covered quite far up the trunk. We’ve suffered quite a bit of rabbit loss. My best, hardiest fruit tree was attacked. I tried to Dr. it but who knows if it will pull through the damage.

Doctor’d apple tree

Osage orange poking out of snow.

Blackberry. I covered them heavily this year as last year they were all entirely eaten away.

As always children running about with moisture inevitably ends with really wet children. I was taking a picture of the gorgeous ice designs in our trench when Son decided to go ice skating and…… well he learned to check the ice thickness before clambering on.

A different kind of snow harvest

Most moisture that arrives to us arrives in the form of snow. It also arrives at about 60 m.p.h. Blowing snow is what I set out to catch and the swales/berms and kraters have proven they are capable of catching it. The best part of that is that they then keep the snow melt in place as they were made for water harvesting.

The snow we had over Thanksgiving was not blowing. In fact it was a beautiful snow, soft, powdery and almost straight down. While our earthworks naturally filled with snow it was not anything that flat land couldn’t have done. So, what surprised me about this snow harvest is that the clover caught it. Acres of tall sweet clover that annoyed us all summer has done wonders at collecting snow.

Mowed contour with clover on both sides

We decided to experiment with this clover, which we did not plant but have in abundance. Husband mowed decently on contour. At least he was able to do some experimental lines, N, S, E, W and an X patter before a loose fence wire got caught in the mower. Then it snowed and everything was a mess. So some mowing was accomplished but not as much as we would have liked. We thought where he mowed would collect blown snow and the remaining, tall clover would assist in keeping it from blowing it away. We may still be right about that but what it did was show us how much tall plant matter can collect and keep at it’s base.

This clover has been interesting to us. It arrived gradually and now we have roughly 35 acres of it. It grows extremely tall. So tall in fact that our ducks often get lost in it. While hunting them down one day in the car we disturbed two deer, which we wouldn’t have seen if they hadn’t started jumping, as the clover was taller than they. This clover is a food for so many animals, our own included. I just hate how tall it is, how smothering it is to the plants I want and how it destroys our mower when we do mow it. Also, it hides those pesky rabbits from predator view.

We caught way more snow than the wheat field behind us.

Still, if it gathers a lot of snow and keeps it on our property I suppose this clover invasion is a blessing, though a mixed one.

This majestic and unintelligent dog certainly loves the snow.

I loved how the different outdoor elements were iced over. This is a clump of grass.

I thought the garden gate I made from a crib mattress looked beautiful all iced up.

Mini-Krater gardens first snow.

I’ve been intensely interested in how much snow our Kraters may collect. They’ve done pretty well with rainwater collection and I assumed they’d fill with blowing snow, but wasn’t sure. The results are in after our first snow.

Deepest Krater with pawpaw island. Had about a foot of snow all around.

Largest Krater in circumference. Snow only collected on one side.

Goji Krater, did the absolute best. For some reason this Krater is just in an ideal location. It always collects the most water, the plants here did the best and it collected the most snow. I’ll have to think and observe why this krater has done so well.

Just for fun here are a few more pics of our first snow collection and fun:

This is our newly renovated driveway drainage ditch. Filled about 3 feet with snow.

This is another driveway drainage earthwork and the path from the garage to the ditch filled pretty well with snow. Enough for the kids to enjoy fully!

As you can see from this pic the snow blows and sometimes we will have 0 snow on large amounts of the property as there is nothing to catch and keep it. We experimented with our earthworks, which work well, and also selective mowing of our incredible sweet clover sections. Selective, on contour mowing harvested a ton of snow. It was far from the house, and the kids were happy where they were, so I didn’t get pics of this. I’ll try to later on.

My kids are so adorable!

I convinced them to go to the barn to feed the pigs and they did this while I was busy doing chores.

Our akbash is such a weirdo. He doesn’t know what to do with the pigs. He just stood there wagging his tail and doing this high pitched whine that the pigs didn’t like at all.

Such cute little piggies! Getting friendlier every day.

Meanwhile, thanksgiving dinner keeps threatening me.

No Freeze, No Fuss, Automatic Poultry Waterer

As most animal owners know, water is the biggest issue in winter. I bought this Awesome Waterer after spending several winters miserably hauling water out to the barn in milk jugs. My problem is that I have ducks and chickens together. So, as soon as I bring out water the ducks dive in and splash it all out of the dish.

I bought the waterer and tested it through the summer. I wanted to see if it could handle the duck stress. It did so admirably. So the next step was winterizing it. To do that I needed to buy a very short hose. I tried to find one at a local box store but I waited too late into fall and could find none. So I ended up buying this 4′ Utility Hose. I then had to buy some heat tape to keep it all from freezing. This proved difficult again as I wanted an odd size of tape. I ended up purchasing this heat tape. It was just long enough. Home Depot does carry this brand of heat tape but I could only find 6′ and 12′ in my store. I needed enough to go over our spigot and run around the water dish. 9′ was just barely long enough. I then bought some pipe insulation and set it all up. I used electrical tape to tape it all together.

Here is my lovely finished product. I have always used 1/2 a dog kennel for summer watering so I put the dish inside it and filled around it with sand to keep down on the mess. I need to buy more sand to perfect it.

I did end up adding more tape to the section of hose that you can see in this picture.

My welshies hang about the water area. I just empty it out once a day. When it is really cold (in the single digits) I do have to go break the ice off the very top of it in the mornings. Otherwise it is doing really well. It has only frozen once, and then because someone unplugged the heat tape. I don’t want to point fingers but I have noticed a particular chicken that thinks it needs to perch on the extension cord.

This post contains affiliate links. I bought those exact products from Amazon and attest to their greatness.