Duckweed wet, duckweed dry

[GBov]

This time I was careful to measure and not use as I went along.

One five-gallon bucket of fresh duckweed has turned into two-thirds of the same bucket dry.

Not yet weighed it and I think, to help it ferment in my grain mix, I am going to give it a blast in the blender to turn it into a meal.

Raising my own will make cleaning the dried weed easier, even being careful in the swamp collecting it, it was full of leaves that had to be picked out.

 

[WVForestGirl]

That's a pretty good yield, I would've thought it had more water than that. I've been wanting to start growing the stuff. Do you have a good book or web resource with tips for success, etc?
Thanks!
Which of your animals eats the fermented meal? Do you use it as a supplement or as a primary food source?

 

[GBov]

I feed everything lacto fermented organic scratch grain and have only just started adding duckweed as a boost to the protein levels.

The new rabbits look fantastic on it, pigs do well, chickens, geese, turkeys, ducks.

Quail did NOT do well as babies but did fine as adults.

I stopped breeding anything about a year ago and only buy adult animals of Craigslist and fatten them to eat. Having said that, several pregnant sows have been bought and done just fine and their piglets likewise.

From my reading and growing of it, duckweed hates wind - it pushes it into a self-mulching pile - and it REALLY does not like it too sunny, the water gets hot and cooks it.

So part shade and sheltered.

And for me raised up off the ground so no snakes get in it. The way frogs are drawn to my aquaculture experiment, I KNOW the snakes are as well and seriously, a snakebite is the last thing I need right now. :roll: :lol:

I will measure the volume once ground up, as it is so fluffy right now much of it is just air. It took 3 days to dry inside, in front of a fan and I did give it one full day outside right at the start, mainly to run most of the water and buggy things out. <br /><br /> __________ Tue Sep 11, 2018 7:11 pm __________ <br /><br /> 5 gallons of fresh duckweed has turned into 13 cups of dried duckweed meal.

If you are grinding it do it outside on your porch, learn from my kitchen which is now a grey-green, dust mess.

Of course, now that I have it all done, I have no idea of proportions to add to my grain. :lol: Never mind, at least I know how much I get per bucket full now.

 

[michaels4gardens]

interesting, thank you for sharing ..
When I had a few hundred laying hens, I also had a customer with a pond she wanted to keep clean, - I built a "skimmer", with a pump hooked to it, and bought "solarshield" window screen and made a long filter, [4'x 6' foot with some 2x4's], the water ran through the screen, and back to the pond, the duckweed traveled down the 45 degree sloped screen, and fell into a trailer, - it took about two hours to fill a 4x8 trailer with 4 foot high sides.[when the wind was blowing the right direction] The chickens ate what they wanted, until the "stink" started, then I tilled the rest into the garden. I could save about 30 - to 50% on layer feed. [and get paid for cleaning the pond]
The duckweed I harvested was probably about 1/3 bugs , so the chickens loved it, and got loads of protein from it. However when the bugs began to die after about the 3rd day, it began to stink, by the 5th day it was bad-so, I dumped what was left in the trailer into the garden, and tilled it in. -- and then went back for more...

 

[WVForestGirl]

Thanks for all the info, sorry about your kitchen.

I don't envy you your snakes. We only get black snakes around here, they don't cause too much trouble but can get pretty big. We just had a 4 footer take a swipe at one of the dogs, scared the crap out of her. I'm pretty sure there's a 6 footer in my garden somewhere but out of sight out of mind as long as it leaves the animals alone.

I will try to find a starter culture of duckweed this weekend. I was thinking of growing it in concrete pans under the counter in the greenhouse for the winter. I'm thinking the ducks and chickens will appreciate a change from the usual over winter. Hopefully the rabbits, too, though my rabbits seem to be very picky about their veggies.

M4g, that sounds great! My spoiled city chickens would probably turn their beaks up at such a feast :lol:

 

[GBov]

M4G, I bet your garden was AMAZING!!!

WVF, I got a package off Amazon in the early spring as I couldn't find any to collect wild.

My eldest son said I should sell my duckweed meal :roll: so just out of curiosity I checked the price online. $20 a pint! :shock: On sale!

 

[akane]

Duckweed doesn't really need a book to grow. It's the biggest aquarium pest plant there is next to algae. If you don't warn people your tanks have it when you trade plant cuttings or exchange fish they are quite annoyed to find rather invisible specks turn into a bloom of the stuff. Any nutrient rich water (not pure filtered, bottled, etc....) will grow it with grow lights or weak sunlight and no water flow. It will clog filters and not reproduce as well with water flow. A 2 bulb shoplight fixture the length of your container usually works if you exchange the bulbs for some generic daylight spectrum but the only time I managed to excessively light the stuff indoors was a saltwater fixture with 4 t5 vho and 2 metal halide over a planted tank. The stuff will start stacking on itself if you give it a lot of light and don't clean it out. I prefer to modify my filtration to allow it to grow without issue in my tanks because if you have a nutrient imbalance in a planted tank duckweed will grow before algae due to it's surface exposure with increased gas exchange and light over fully submerged plants or algae. I could use up whatever I grew fresh but it's end result without water should be about 35% protein give or take 10% depending on conditions.

One benefit of living where it's cold is practically never worrying about venomous snakes so a snake bite is a rather trivial thing. Even if most don't realize how trivial. From experience a 6' bull or 8' rat/black snake bite at full force is really less damage than a cat can do. Considerably less. Also less risk of infection provided you rinse out any dislodged teeth. My grandma down in arkansas kept yelling at me while I was hunting crayfish as a kid. She didn't like the fact you just stick your hand in underwater holes in Iowa and don't worry about anything worse than getting a bigger crayfish than planned. :lol:

 

[GBov]

That is what I loved best about living in England and then Ireland, NOTHING is dangerous in the water! Lovely.

Resisting going onto CL looking for free 10-gallon fishtanks, too much to do today to start any more projects! That is for AFTER I get the rabbits and turkeys into the freezer.

 

[MaggieJ]

My grandma down in arkansas kept yelling at me while I was hunting crayfish as a kid. She didn't like the fact you just stick your hand in underwater holes in Iowa and don't worry about anything worse than getting a bigger crayfish than planned. :lol:

I don't know about how safe that was, Akane. As a kid I once was about to grab what I thought was a frog underwater, but it turned out at be a snapping turtle. And they can give quite a bite!

No venomous snakes in this part of Ontario, but further north around Georgian Bay there are rattlesnakes. One more thing we had to watch out for during our childhood summers at our grandparents' cottage.

Could weaner pigs be fed partly on duckweed? It could be a good resource for my character in my novel. I wonder if they knew about it back in the 1890s.

 

[WVForestGirl]

I had done a bit of snooping around online a while ago and thought I remembered risk of contamination/competition from something, algae maybe? Sounded like potential for a gross mess in any case, that's why I was asking. I think I'll just try to get some before winter and start experimenting with it. I can always pitch it in the compost if it doesn't work out.

Eek, I don't like sticking my hands in places like that, my imagination is usually worse than anything I've ever actually found. Did come face to face with a very large gar while snorkeling in a murky Georgia river once, though. :x

We do have rattlesnakes here, too. Haven't seen any in the yard or the neighborhood, thankfully.

 

[akane]

The timber and prairie rattlesnake are endangered here and hate human activity. I've only heard one first hand account of one while the person was hunting and no sign of dead ones either. They also aren't likely to be hiding in water or your backyard while being quite easy to tell quickly what it is if you are out hiking. Not like the copperheads I actually saw come up on the 2nd level porch of my grandma's house.

Duckweed can end up with algae but it's harmless most of the time and enough duckweed should outcompete algae by blocking the light and using up all major nutrients. If you make really high phosphate and nitrate water plus full sunlight you might have a problem since algae could find enough to survive despite duckweed or take over between duckweed harvests. It's uncommon to run into dangerous algae and even less in northern climates so it would simply dilute your final product in most cases. A few tropical areas including florida see toxic algae blooms more frequently. Bugs can be an outdoor issue but less so for container or even pool growing than natural bodies of water or in ground ponds that would be surrounded by ideal habitat or might have soil bottoms with lots of other bog/aquatic plants to attract things. You don't get the gunk of a natural pond even outdoors unless you ignore a build up of solid material for many years. Indoors it should be pretty minimal with only pest snails and small amounts below the surface of green or brown algae forms that might have some stuck to the duckweed roots. I don't find any other growing conditions to be that important such as our 9ph water not being uncommon in Iowa. Maybe if you were trying to get every last bit of ideal growth and nutrition out of a large duckweed pool the few percentages different for more minor water values would mean something but generally you just fertilize it without over fertilizing to grow excessive algae and light it without over lighting and you get double the duckweed every few days.

I would think lacking a rumen hogs would do even better on it. Duckweed proteins are partially destroyed by ruminants but that hasn't stopped it from being turned into a useful addition to cattle diets. http://www.lrrd.org/lrrd7/1/3.htm , https://www.feednavigator.com/Article/2 ... ttle-farms , as this says the issue mainly has been with moving and drying large quantities https://www.offthegridnews.com/how-to-2 ... -duckweed/ . It's growth may be more efficient than crops but harvesting and processing by hand probably was never as efficient as growing things on land and specialized machinery has yet to be developed for harvesting such aquatic sources.

 

[MaggieJ]

I took a look at Florida snakes. Six venomous species: three kinds of rattlesnakes, copperheads, coral snakes, and water moccasins (aka cottonmouths). Uggh! Too many for me!

I like snakes, but I can only enjoy them if I'm not worried about a venomous bite.

How many of those six species have you seen, GBov?

 

[GBov]

I took a look at Florida snakes. Six venomous species: three kinds of rattlesnakes, copperheads, coral snakes, and water moccasins (aka cottonmouths). Uggh! Too many for me!

I like snakes, but I can only enjoy them if I'm not worried about a venomous bite.

How many of those six species have you seen, GBov?

Seen or encountered? Four of the six!

Youngest son almost put his food down onto a pygmy rattlesnake this last spring, no fewer than SIX coral snakes have been seen, killed or removed in the kid's father's yard in suburbia, have picked up fresh hit diamondback rattlers for dinner - seriously, if you get the chance, take it, the meat is great fried and the dried hide sells for lovely cash, just be careful - and water moccasins are soooooo hard to see when walking I have almost stepped on them more than once and as they look totally different as babies, I actually managed to get a fang scraped across my thumb when moving one out of my way due to not paying enough attention. Not an actual bite but blimey, it hurt for weeks!

We are too far south to be in copperhead range which is good, while the moccasin has the rep copperheads are actually more dangerous. Slow to strike but they almost never dry bite or bluff.

I have seen many non-venomous snakes in the yard here in the Forest with one that I still have no idea what it was, and for me, that is very odd indeed. Well up on snakes, me. In my defense we were both moving at a fair clip in heavy cover, me trying to see what it was and it trying to get the hell away from me and it won that race. :lol: In Florida, it could have been someone's escapee, like the Egyptian cobra I saw crossing the road in South Carolina :shock: or just not a good enough look to be sure of an ID. It looked like a yellow rat snake marked and colored water snake, short, fat, heavy headed but muddy yellow with several stripes running down its body. No idea and google was no help.

Snakes are cool but if that itty bitty scratch is anything to go by, I NEVER want to get bitten properly!

 

[Deer Heart]

I have seen many non-venomous snakes in the yard here in the Forest with one that I still have no idea what it was, and for me, that is very odd indeed. Well up on snakes, me. In my defense we were both moving at a fair clip in heavy cover, me trying to see what it was and it trying to get the hell away from me and it won that race. :lol: In Florida, it could have been someone's escapee, like the Egyptian cobra I saw crossing the road in South Carolina :shock: or just not a good enough look to be sure of an ID. It looked like a yellow rat snake marked and colored water snake, short, fat, heavy headed but muddy yellow with several stripes running down its body. No idea and google was no help.

Snakes are cool but if that itty bitty scratch is anything to go by, I NEVER want to get bitten properly!

Shot in the dark but could it have been a florida pine snake?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pituophis_melanoleucus

If so, a rare find indeed! I saw one once while walking on the trailhead off baseline near maricamp.

 

[GBov]

Nope, but a good guess. The one I saw had teh body shape - short and fat - of a water snake but not the color.

I keep my eyes open when outside in case I see it again or the body if the dogs find it first.

 

[Deer Heart]

Nope, but a good guess. The one I saw had teh body shape - short and fat - of a water snake but not the color.

I keep my eyes open when outside in case I see it again or the body if the dogs find it first.

Actually, if that ain't it I'm pretty sure it was an escaped pet of some kind. Likely not a color morphed ball python (they have too much of a neck to fit the shape), but possibly something similar to that. I wish it stuck around longer. I love finding ones I don't know yet.

 

[GBov]

Your light color morph is close, I will admit so that may have been it. It was fast so if I spot it again I will sneak up on it better, I was out feeding so not being quiet. :lol:

 

[Deer Heart]

lol, sorry I edited it off, I saw I was top of page and realized a snake phobe not expecting it to be part of the convo might of had a heart attack lol

I was actually here initially because I was contemplating buying some off you in the future possibly. >> Like once I'm down to just 6 "keeper" ducks.