Now that the ducks are laying again, we’ve decided to try and use them for what their original purpose was: hatching eggs. For those of you who may have remembered, last year Gabe found himself with $50 to spend, which he wanted to use to buy a drake (male duck) to breed with our duck hens. His idea was to hatch the eggs and sell ducklings at a profit. After all, Silver Appleyards are considered a rare heritage breed, and as ducklings they go for $7-$10 apiece depending on their age. Plus, we could use a few replacement layers as our ducks are getting older. He ended up with 5 ducklings, and as luck would have it, they turned out to be four females and one male-a perfect ratio for successful breeding.

I think Gabe thinks he’s going to get rich off this endeavor. Wait until he realizes the expenses of feed and upkeep! I don’t think he’s thinking about that at the moment, though. I think he’s thinking about how many sets of Legos he might be able to buy. He keeps asking how much we should charge for them, and our response to him over and over again is: don’t count your chickens (well, ducklings) before they’ve hatched! Doesn’t stop him from asking every few days, though.

Anyway, friends of ours aren’t planning on hatching this year, so they’ve let us borrow their incubator. This is a highly experimental undertaking on our part and we’re anticipating some disappointment. We do plan to try a second hatch if these eggs prove to be duds in the hopes that we will be able to adjust where we may have gone wrong the first time.

 

So, we have an incubator humming along in our living room with 11 eggs in it! With any luck at least a couple of them will hatch and we’ll have cute ducklings on our hands, with a fantastic homeschooling lesson to boot. It might take awhile for them to get it – Daniel keeps asking whether or not they’re hatching yet. We wonder whether he thinks the incubator is some kind of microwave/time machine. At four, it’s hard to understand the whole ‘28 days’ concept! We were able to candle the eggs this evening, hopefully as they begin to develop he’ll start to work out that it’s a process.