What a season?!?!  By far, the most challenging growing season we have faced in our ten years of farming in the Finger Lakes.  I’ll skip over the lost crops, low yields, and potential weather disasters to address why Daring Drake duck eggs are so hard to come by this season.

When we began planting our orchard ten years ago we knew we would need all the help we could get in organically controlling pests.  We decided to raise a small flock of ducks – a Buff/Runner mix – to roam the orchard eating insects.  When we ate our first duck eggs, we were hooked.  We grew our flock of ducks and sold the eggs to support purchasing local, organic grains as supplemental feed for our waddling orchard workers.

Enter the winter of 2011-2012 – the mildest winter since we began raising ducks.  Our ducks consistently laid eggs the entire winter, the first season the girls skipped their January and February hiatus.  This was okay, it was nice to stock Greenstar with eggs all winter, but a duck will only lay so  many eggs per year and we knew production would be down slightly in the 2012 season.  Then, in June our neighbor’s dog got into our orchard and slaughtered a number of ducks, along with our laying and meat chickens.  That was quite a set-back.  More recently, we have had a very brazen fox snatching birds. All told, our flock is down 40% over last season.

We are spending the 2012 season rearing young birds to replace our duck flock, however it will not be until 2013 that this effort will be seen.  For the duck egg fans out there – absence makes the heart grow fonder.  Can’t wait until the 2013 eggs arrive!