Why do I need ducks?

“You don't have a slug problem; you have a duck deficiency.”  - Bill Mollison

There are a variety of reasons why you should want ducks. They lay eggs and/or can be reared for meat, they eat garden pests, are a great pet, increase the fertility of your soil, use up many types of food scrap, are great company when doing the weeding and in a great many ways deserve the title of “clowns of the garden”.

For us, the simple reason why we needed ducks was that our garden and the plants within it, whether edibles or ornamentals, were being absolutely ravaged by slugs and snails. We live in Austria (Alps, not kangaroos), where we have pretty much every type of slug and snail imaginable: cute little black slugs, half-inch grey slugs, orangey-brown slugs up to a foot in length, big black snails with orange patches, teeny almost invisible snails, humongous Weinberg snails (the ones you find in French restaurants) and everything in between. Some gardening years in Austria are so bad that the slugs even start eating plants which are supposed to be slug-proof, like tomatoes!

But wait, did you try…

YES! We tried slug pellets (yes, both ferramol and metaldehyde), we tried beer traps, we tried copper strips, we tried spiky slug fences made from old cans, we tried wood ash, we tried chalk, we tried that thing where you cut a potato in half and go collect the slugs afterwards, we tried that thing where you put down wooden planks and pick the slugs off the bottom while they sleep during the daytime, we tried hand collecting them just after dusk… we tried all those and many more.

All of them worked a little, but when all it takes is one slug to break through your defences and cut a seedling in half at the stalk, "a little" really isn't good enough. You need something to drastically alter the slug equilibrium in the long term. And do you know what really does work? Ducks!

That is why we need ducks. If you have a garden of a reasonable size, I’d wager that you need ducks too!