Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

tc OMG duck tv.....i actually watched your birds tonite. good job, i wonder how clean is the water? and will it support plant growth? i have way to many muskies free ranging here an i am fixing to pen them up in a nice duck area. i have culled down to 3 large males an 10 females. any advise will be great, if i could grow some corn or collards even better.
the tv thing is way cool tho.......

Hay I just added another video clip with baby ducks to the Duck TV page too
http://www.aquaponiclynx.com/aquaponic-lynx-live-garden-cameras/duck-tv
Half way down the page right hand video clip

Three males and 10 females, I'd probably cull the males down to only two, especially if you ever wind up with more than a couple of the females sitting on nests at once. I originally had two males and they would both insist on trying to do duck a pornics with the females daily and if one of the poor girls was sitting on eggs and coming out for her once daily feed and bath, she would get really upset to be bothered by more than one drake. (It's the only time I've heard much noise out of the female muscovy ducks.) I currently have 4 adult females and the one drake and it seems ok. Three females were definitely not enough for him and 5 females to one male would work ok too. I do have 4 younger ducks but they will probably become food soon as we have a newly hatched batch of babies and another moma sitting on a clutch which will probably hatch in two weeks.

As to duck-a-ponics, we make a point of growing fodder for the birds in it as we don't want to risk growing human food in a duck system as we are not that good at always cooking all veggies before eating ya know.

I'm lately pumping the water for about 6 minutes and then off for about 8 minutes with a repeat cycle timer and that is keeping the water nice and clear. The current set up the first six minutes the pump runs it is filling the water tanks, then the pump turns off for a bit to let the water in the bed slowly percolate down to the pump, then when the pump turns on again it will fill the water tanks to the point of kicking over the siphon which drains into the duck pond tank which then overflows down to the grow bed "duck river"

the veggies i grow would be farm animal food, rabbits sheep ect. mostly i don't want to have to mess with cleaning their pond, the DP might be a bit more costly from a start up point of view, but over the long run time & labor of clean pool, and feed at $8-12 a bag a simple system would more than pay for its self. rabbit feed is fast growing in AP and quite expencive per bag.
we eat the ducks on quite a regular basis it is so close to beef, and quite good as cube steaks.

oh no doubt a duck system is well worth a little $$ to set up in order to have nice water and not have to be dumping and re-filling a kiddie pool or stock tank for them all the time.

heck, mine didn't actually cost much to set up as Most of the materials I already had. Like the big galvanized tank that some one gave me, had holes in it that I patched and since it's galvanized it wouldn't work for aquaponics. The liner I used was the old leaky liner from the monster bed. I got the water tanks for free, most of the plumbing was already here. Just needed the pump and a timer.

TC, thanks for the cool videos.
How old are the little ones in the latest video? They sure stick with mama.

Now y'all got me wanting some muscovy ducks.

Maybe I need to take this over to backyard farming, I am thinking of putting ducks on an earthen pond. Not sure if I could contain them very well as predators would be a problem, mostly foxes and coyotes.

the video shows the babies at about a day and a half out of the shell.

Yep they do stick with moma and she is protective. Muscovy ducks make great momas.

I'm not sure how best to protect them a we have had some trouble with nest raiding but it's gotten better since we got the electric net fencing.

However if you are talking about a fairly large pond, perhaps a raft out in the pond with nest boxes and some sort of ramp for them to get on and off the raft would protect them at night and keep the nests from being raided too much.

Cool, they are new borns.

Love the raft nest box idea. Guess the adults fend for themselves okay in the daytime?

I don't know how well they would fend against fox or coyote because we probably don't have too many of them here. I've only ever had one bird vanish without a trace and that was a chicken. All the rest have been accounted for.

they fend well, i have 20 dogs and never lost a duck to enemy action

In regular aquaponics when designed appropriately, the gravel does no need re-washing.

However, on the ground duck bed where chickens can be scratching dirt/mulch into the duck bed and ducks can easily wash mouth fulls of dirt into it and then plod around with their feet compacting it, well, the gravel in the duck river doesn't percolate anymore and is quite mucked up!!!!!

Now I can't take it away from them completely cause they just love it some much but it is time for some re-working of the duck system.

Duck muck (I believe the reason that the duck system has never had outrageous nitrate levels is that de-nitrification has been going on in the anoxic layers under the gravel in the duck river.

Quackwaponics! Yuck those pics remind me of what my porch looked like when I had lots of muscovies and peking ducks at my place. The muscovies are very nice eating birds. One of mine went all psycho duck on me and would violently attack people. It would even attack people while swimming! Could inflict some serious scratches.

I like the muscovies (quackless) but I can definitely see how a 15 pound bird with nails like theirs could do some damage. Yea if one of the drakes takes to attacking, it's time to do that one in. My understanding is if they get to thinking they are dominant to people, you gotta kick them of that habit or sit on them till they knock it off or time to be eating a big duck!!!

Luckily ours are all pretty docile (except for a moma duck with small ducklings, see will attack if she thinks you are after the babies.)

Anyway, I must figure out some easy way to make duckaponics lower maintenance.

Could you raise the level of the pond so they need to walk up a ramp, preventing them from washing mud into it?

Or perhaps this would be a good situation for a settling stage, something that would allow mud and sand to settle out and only the floating solids would pass through..

Still, fine mud will find it's way into the growbed, but perhaps much less.

The pond is actually up high (a stock tank) that they walk up ramps to get to.

The grow bed is down on the ground and it is directly into the grow bed that the chickens tend to scratch the dirt. Now I suppose I could fence the birds away from the grow bed but it's turned into their "duck river" and the ducklings love the shallow water in the duck river so I hate to take it away from them.

Yesterday I did some work digging out the pump end of the bed. So I'm hoping that the far end I can leave as "duck river" and then keep them out of a larger portion of the bed closer to the pump and I'm going to add more "cleanable" net filtration before the pump.

Not the most ideal but I'm not prepared to totally re-do the duck system at the moment as I have several other more pressing projects.

The cook keeps talking about adding a second grow bed and then alternating them. I'm not sure if this is really an option since the pump is down in the bed in the ground so it would involve plumbing under ground with liner which Id rather not do, or a second pump.

Sorry to keep coming up with more thoughts....I suffer from ideaphoria. *grin*

Plus, experiments based on constructed wetlands to create a clean duckpond lead me to AP in the first place.

A thinner layer of gravel would allow you to clean the play area far more easily.

One could pump from a low, fenced growbed (NO DUCKS, just raise flowers, duck food, etc) to a duck pond, to a shallow play area, to a deep (no ducks) settling pond, and back to growbed. But how to clean out settling pond? Could one construct it with a conical bottom and use a few tilapia to help the material settle as I've read? Then suck sludge from the bottom (one minute slurp with sump pump should do it) every day or week?

OK, got to go. The nice young men in their clean white coats are coming...