Wild and Wonderful - Solar-Powered Farming in West Virginia's Lakes and Mountains

It's December 3rd 2014.  It is wet. It is also windy out there with light mist, heavy grey cloud and a temperature of 47 F. To this Brit, there are times when this state is so much like Scotland in summer, it's uncanny.  When I lived in England, I had made many visits to the Scottish Highlands and Islands over the decades, and it remains one of the most beautiful and unspoilt parts of Europe to this day. West-By-God-Virginia actually sits on the exact same ancient foundational rock and at one time, Scotland and West Virginia were more or less set side by side. Amazing, hey!  No wonder so many Scottish migrants ended up here. These mountains must have indeed felt like home, as they do to me today. Maybe it's my own Scottish ancestry that has something to do with it.

The fan in the wood stove hums, blowing heat across the living room of our log home, over a multitude of sleepy cats, before the ceiling fan  in the family room on the second floor sucks the hot air upwards and distributes it to all four corners of this wonderful space where I sit at my desk with my laptop, awaiting a refill of my coffee cup from hubby.

Autumn's Last Fling - October 16th 2014 - View from my desk

This is NOT a day for humans to be outdoors; nor chickens for that matter.  My small flock of clucks are quite happy scratching up the deep litter in the duck pen today, looking for compost worms and other goodies that are working on breaking down the material in the deepest layers.

Cogburn, our hard-working rooster

Like us, chickens don't like rain very much,  but the ducks are absolutely in their element. This is what they were made for - water!


A magnificent herd of 14 Khaki Campbell ducks (The Khaki Army) with two beautiful black Cayugas, whom John and I named Sapphire and Emerald, race across the front lawn below me, followed by the seven Magpie ducks, stopping for only for a few minutes to further excavate an expanding mud hole where two days ago there was grass. You KNOW that in that short time they will have found and consumed a couple dozen drowning worms.

Then "Onward, onward" - they hurtle down the grassy bank by the waterfall, into the pond  (lake or pool to my British friends and family) where there is much quacking, flapping, diving and up-ending of ducky butts with flapping feet. I then watch them line up in a row and start to work the waterline, eking out edibles from the soft mud, earth and grass that make up the margins of our 1 acre pond. I smile - every grub, worm, larva, beetle and plant that they eat is making our wonderful, golden-yolked duck eggs and reducing the feed bill for the Nature's Best Organic Layer Mix that we buy in 50 lb bags from Southern States - I smile again...