I Planted a Food Forest For My Ducks No More Mud Pit

They say ducks are just messy. That a mud pit is just what happens and you have to accept it. I didn't buy that. So I spent the last several months trying to prove it wrong. This whole process started back in 2025. I removed the ducks from the small run space they had. It had turned into a complete mud pit. And yeah, ducks are messy, that's true. But I thought, maybe if I planted some perennials and different grasses and added some protected areas where regrowth could happen without the ducks tearing everything out of the ground, maybe this could actually work. So in the fall, I planted cover crops, crimson clover, a cover crop mix I had bought. I moved the ducks into tractors or their quackters, see what I did there, and planted the seeds to remake their whole run. It took a while for anything to start coming up the following spring, but slowly it did. And then there was the issue of their water. Ducks need a water source to bathe and drink and just play in. So we dug them a small pond with a shovel and used an old tarp as a liner. But we kept having issues with the water draining out of the pond slowly, and I eventually realized the tarp probably had some small holes in it somewhere. So I set it up again with a new liner, a greenhouse plastic I had on hand, and that one actually held the water. Then we started thinking about filtration, because ducks instantly make their water dirty. That's just what they do. So keeping clean water in there is essential. So here's what we came up with, a bucket with three layers inside of it. On the bottom I put a small clay pot, and surrounding that was lava rocks. On top of the lava rocks, I laid a layer of dish sponges, and the top layer was the fluffy stuffing from inside of a pillow. Three layers of filtration fed by a pump at the bottom of their small pond. When I plugged it in, I honestly wasn't sure if it was going to do anything, but it worked. This water is crystal clear in just four or five hours since this has been running. How cool is that? Let's see all the way to the bottom, because the ducks are going to make this dirty in about two seconds. But it wasn't perfect at first. I realized I needed to dig the pond just a little bit deeper, so the pump could fully sit on the bottom consistently. And once I did that, it ran perfectly. And pretty quickly, it turned that muddy water completely clear. It was honestly amazing. I couldn't believe how well it worked. I did add some duckweed to the pond too, but the plants were so small that they kept clogging the filter, so I'm not sure if I'm going to end up keeping them there long term. I might grow them somewhere else and just toss them in occasionally. But once the pond was set, it was time. It's been long enough for them. We originally had four ducks. We hatched eight more this spring. We gave four to a friend, so right now we have eight ducks. But only two of those eight ducks ended up being females, and those are the ones we're going to keep in the new space. And today, they're going back into their new run for the first time. We're going to put this guy in the new duck area for the first time. Let's see how they do. These are the girls. These are two girls. Now before I show you the ducks going back in, I want to talk about something real quick. Raising ducks is a dirty job. There's no getting around it. They are extremely messy animals, and I say that as someone who genuinely loves them. The pond, the run, the chores, it's all wet and muddy, and that's just part of it. The way I manage all of that, the duck chores, the chicken chores, everything I do out here in the garden, is with boots that I can actually trust. For the last two years, I've been wearing these Hyceia deck boots, and honestly, I forget I'm wearing them half the time. They're just that comfortable. They just slide on and off, which makes a real difference when you're going in and out 20 times a day. My son actually has a matching pair now, so we can do chores together. And he is rough on his shoes, like genuinely rough, so it's good to know he can just wear them and be a kid without me worrying about it. What I really appreciated was when one pair had an issue, I reached out to Hyceia about their lifetime warranty, and they honored it with no questions asked. That meant a lot to me, because that's just not something you see much anymore. If you want to try a pair for yourself, you can get 15% off using code DDH15. The link is in the description. All right, now let's get these ducks back in their new home. And there is so much food in here for them right now. Jerusalem artichokes, which are deeply rooted plants, so they're going to have a really hard time pulling those completely out of the ground. There's the cover crop mixes in the raised beds with lattice on top, so they can eat the edges but can't destroy the whole thing at once. There's a lettuce mix I planted right on the ground. There's crimson clover that's flowering right now. And then there's the lamb's quarter. I never planted lamb's quarter in here, it just showed up. And honestly, it's been the best plant in our chicken tunnels too, for how much the birds scratched at it, how it dropped seeds everywhere, and just came back the year earlier and denser than anything I put there on purpose. I never had to plant it, it just keeps coming back. And I'm letting all of it go to seed. As soon as we put them out here, they loved it. And what I love is that I hatched these ducklings at home, raised them right here, and now I'm watching them play in a pond with clean water that filters itself. They look so happy. Now, I'm not sure how long this run will stay green. That's the honest truth. Maybe they turn it all into a mud pit and it's just a matter of time. I don't know. But what I do know is I want to make this area larger. If I can expand it, I can maybe run them in one section for a few weeks and let the other section recover. Graze them that way so they're never back in a mud pit. We'll see. We will also be harvesting the males for meat. They're rough on the females, and we don't need that many males with this few females. I might also mix some of the females into the chicken run and keep the younger ducklings in this new space. And hopefully, they'll start laying eggs in their little repurposed doghouse shelter area. In a previous video, I mentioned how I thought ducks were quieter than chickens. And I got quite a few comments of pushback on that. And now I understand why. After hatching these new ducklings, I have second thoughts about that statement. Our first ducks weren't too loud at all. But these new ducklings are so noisy and obnoxious, to be honest. And I realized that is likely because I hatched mostly males. I was thinking about maybe lowering the amount of chickens I had and maybe having more ducks. But I'm realizing that maybe just a handful of ducks is all I'll really need. This space is small, so I don't want them tearing it up too quickly. And I don't want too much noise. And while these female ducks have been relatively quiet for the last several months, as soon as I put them in this nice new green run space, without being harassed by the boys, all of a sudden they started going crazy, being so loud and acting like different ducks than I'd experienced every month prior. Perhaps it was just their joy of having a more open natural space than the tractors I've had them in. But they became too noisy, announcing their presence to everyone in the neighborhood. They appear to be very nervous and flighty birds, similar to my experience with the white leghorns and some Americana chickens. So I decided after all this work to create this space, it wasn't going to be for these ducks. So I decided to swap these khaki Campbell ducks for Muscovy ducks, as they tend to be much quieter than other Mallard descendant ducks. So we will see how the Muscovy ducks perform as a stealthy, self-sufficient animal very soon. And I truly do enjoy the added security of having ducks in addition to chickens. Ducks have proven to be more consistent at glares year-round, when chickens tend to slow down in winter. These ducks will make our homestead much more resilient. If you're new here, make sure you're subscribed. I'm growing a garden to feed my ducks and my chickens, and there is a lot more to come on all of this.