{"id":296,"date":"2010-02-11T10:52:57","date_gmt":"2010-02-11T17:52:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/?page_id=296"},"modified":"2012-04-21T15:28:09","modified_gmt":"2012-04-21T22:28:09","slug":"in-the-beginning","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/?page_id=296","title":{"rendered":"In the Beginning"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>If it is too good to be true, then it involves free ducks.<\/p>\n

An entire neighborhood gathered to help me catch ducks from their overpopulated pond.\u00a0 There were jubilant smiles and hearty backslapping as the crate was shoved into my truck. \u201cYou\u2019re gonna love these ducks.\u201d \u00a0 \u201cThey\u2019re no trouble at all.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cPractically take care of themselves.\u201d\u00a0 Note to self:\u00a0 no one is that glad to see a good thing go.\u00a0 But my children were already peering excitedly at their sullen captives while debating names, and besides, I had a PLAN.<\/p>\n

Of course, a plan is best kept under wraps.\u00a0 Telling friends and family about a plan is like FEMA issuing disaster mitigation guidelines.\u00a0 There will be unforeseen circumstances.\u00a0 Participants will fail to follow protocol.\u00a0 There will be casualties and no end to contributory negligence.\u00a0 Besides, over-planning could result in ridiculous made-up words. ( \u201cPreparedness\u201d?\u00a0 Really?)\u00a0 In any case, if you keep the plan a secret then you can always pretend there was no plan.\u00a0 This makes you seem like an exciting person whose exploits result from chance\u00a0 and fortitude instead of a miscalculating moron.\u00a0 Trust me, keep the plan to yourself.<\/p>\n

All the way home I pondered the profits of organic poultry.\u00a0 All that night snug in my bed, visions of free range duck danced in my head.\u00a0 Farmers markets and Internet sales and upscale restaurants, oh my.\u00a0 All I had to do was let the ducks live on my pond, hatch their eggs, and then sell the young ducks to a population yearning for healthy, natural, and gourmet meat.\u00a0 There was not a single farmer specializing in raising and selling duck in my entire state!\u00a0 (hmmm, what should that tell me?)\u00a0 How could anyone miss such an obvious and easy opportunity?\u00a0 Insert evil (and ignorant) laughter here.<\/p>\n

Turns out that waiting with a commercially raised and packaged frozen duck (up to 10% water, unknown liquids, and frightening things you can\u2019t say or spell added) under your arm in the longest line at Wally World, with a new cashier on her first day, behind a customer with 3\u00a0 returns without receipts that were actually bought at Target, another customer who has 2 items without UPC codes (how did we price things before the computer did it for us?), and another customer who waits until it is her turn to check out to realize she forgot the milk so she sends her 6 year old back to the grocery aisles to get it, is a simpler and much less stressful way to get meat than raising it yourself.\u00a0 Shocking, I know.<\/p>\n

So there were a few glitches in my plan.\u00a0 Nothing insurmountable.\u00a0 Just housing, breeding, growth rate, predator protection,\u00a0 USDA processing, marketing, and my neighbors calling about 60 ducks climbing into their professionally installed 20 gallon decorative pond surrounded by expensive (and apparently edible) landscaping. \u00a0 I could have avoided some of these problems with a bit of research before I started, but really, who does that?\u00a0 I have found that real experience embeds information in the hippocampus much better than skimming farm books while locked in the bathroom with half your kids beating on the door while the other half are scouring the cabinets for hidden cookies.\u00a0 Although I am sure Storey\u2019s Guide to Raising Ducks addressed adequate containment, I didn\u2019t discard deer netting as fencing until a raccoon neatly chewed through it and had duckling nuggets for a midnight snack.\u00a0 And, by the way, chicken wire will keep out raccoons but not black snakes who can slide through easily and, even worse, weave their bodies through the holes so that they cannot be pulled out by the tail.\u00a0 (If you are even courageous<\/span> stupid<\/span> desperate enough to grab a black snake by the tail.)\u00a0 Chicken wire to keep out raccoons.\u00a0 Deer netting to keep out snakes.\u00a0 Yep, the School of Hard Knocks for me.<\/p>\n

By the time a friend arrived to find me cutting a duck loose from the 500 feet of fishing line I had strung from tree to tree to prevent hawk attacks, I knew I should have kept the plan to myself.\u00a0 When we sat down to coffee at the dining room table (underneath which there was a brooder box filled with 18 ducklings), I was forced to endure such humiliating questions like \u201cHow many have you raised so far?\u201d, \u201cIf any do survive, who\u2019s going to butcher them?\u201d, and \u201cDo you know who you\u2019re going to sell them to?\u201d \u00a0\u00a0 Never mind, the rhetorical, \u201cHow much money have you made?\u201d\u00a0 No \u201cfriend\u201d should laugh that hard at the weeping and gnashing of teeth that goes into transforming some free ducks into a specialty free range duck farm.\u00a0 Really, it\u2019s so unattractive to squirt coffee through your nose.<\/p>\n

In the end, though, the farmer (that\u2019s me!) got the last laugh.\u00a0 Especially when those ducks morphed into a breeding stock of 30 birds and sales of up to 300 ducks a year through farmers markets, the Internet, and upscale restaurants.\u00a0 Oh my.\u00a0 My friend even created a new term to explain the various duck housing, food and water containers, and predator protection devices created from pallets, leftover tin, mixed drink buckets, flower pots, and kitty liter boxes.\u00a0 \u201cErgonomic reuse\u201d\u2013turning unused\/discarded items into comfortable and safe farm components.\u00a0 Thank you, Patricia.\u00a0 Take that, FEMA.\u00a0 My original concept was too good to be true.\u00a0 Ducks can\u2019t take care of themselves and they are a bit of trouble.\u00a0 But I did learn to love them.\u00a0 And creating the farm was a good thing.<\/p>\n

Good like standing over your kids as they watch a life peck its way into this big, amazing world.<\/p>\n

\n

Good like learning that it\u2019s true\u2013 if you try,try, and try again, you will succeed.<\/p>\n

\n

Good like discovering even the hardest chore on the farm goes by faster with a companion.<\/p>\n

\n

Good like spending your days in the great outdoors\u2026<\/p>\n

\n

\u2026and taking comfort in the friends around you.<\/p>\n

\n

Just plain good.<\/p>\n

\t \t\t \t \t
\n<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If it is too good to be true, then it involves free ducks. An entire neighborhood gathered to help me catch ducks from their overpopulated pond.\u00a0 There were jubilant smiles and hearty backslapping as the crate was shoved into my truck. \u201cYou\u2019re gonna love these ducks.\u201d \u00a0 \u201cThey\u2019re no trouble at all.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cPractically take care […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":2,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-296","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/296","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=296"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/296\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4621,"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/296\/revisions\/4621"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}