Every new transplant I put in the garden was losing leaves, bit by bit.

We saw the ducks in the garden now and again, and didn’t realize what was happening until we witnessed one wandering through and casually yanking off leaves with her bill.

And then – the worst – we caught our largest drake squatting in the middle of our transplant production bed, nibbling away. In minutes, he had shredded over a hundred seedlings we were planning on setting out in the garden rows.

We put up more fencing. We shut gates. We did our best. Yet they found they could fly over and get back to eating transplants.

So – knowing what we now knew – most of the ducks were given away and one was roasted for dinner. One remained behind because she was sitting on a nest.

My gardens are our bread and butter. As much as I enjoyed the meat, the cost was too high.

Due to ducks we lost:

100 small transplants

3 rows of collards

1 bed of cabbages

2 rows of cabbage, broccoli and cauliflower (which cost $1 each as transplants, since our seedling transplants had been destroyed!)

And a few kale we’d planted in our herb areas.

They moved FAST once they decided to attack the gardens, and were very sneaky about getting in.

So now they are gone, and I hope we can salvage what’s left of this year to get a few vegetables before the real cold of winter sets in. We’ve lost six weeks of production already.

I dispatched the final surviving duck this morning after Rachel caught her in the garden early this morning. She sat for a month and a half without hatching anything and she just wrecked about a half-dozen newly purchased transplants.

Enough is enough.

Anates delenda est!