Subject: [permaculture] Central Texas - eggs, meat, down, feathers, fertility and more
Date: Sat, 24 Jan 2009 10:40:33 -0600
A Gaggle of Geese for Sale
We have a group of four Brown Chinese geese for sale as a group. They
are two years old and currently laying. They laid last year, raised a
few goslings, and they were excellent parents (all of them look after
the youngsters).
These Chinese geese are excellent egg layers, laying from approximately
October to March here in Central Texas. A goose egg is delicious and
huge; equivalent to 3 or 4 large chicken eggs. We collect and eat the
eggs until about late January when we let the hens start setting to
raise up a brood of new young goslings.
Geese are excellent homestead animals as they primarily live off of
grass, and actually disdain grains unless there is nothing else
available. They don't eat many broad-leafed plants, but they do eat
some. They do not eat bugs. They require shade in the summer, as
everyone in Texas does, but no significant housing in the winter (they
do have goose down after all). They need fresh water every day, and
when you come to purchase them, we will show you how we use drinking
water buckets gravity fed from drums.which simply need to be kicked over
each day to refill with clean water. You should have two of the
drinking water buckets for redundancy - and so you can slip off for a
day if you need to.
Goose meat is a dark, short grained meat and is very tasty not having a
strong flavor like goat or mutton does. As with any livestock, it is
always better young, but we have eaten them several years old. Just
boil the meat on a low heat for several hours and use in stews.
We use our geese primarily for fertility in our small orchard. We put
fresh water into shallow tubs placed beneath our fruit trees. The geese
love it and bathe, preen, copulate, and of course defecate in the water
making a good ole mess which doesn't sound real appealing to you or me,
but is wonderful stuff for fruit and nut trees. We rotate the tubs
around the orchard and a significant amount of fertility is provided.
Since the geese love grass, they tend to munch on what is closest and
help out with the weeding.
They can fly a little bit, but it is more comical than practical. A 2
to 3 foot fence easily keeps them confined.
They would love to be on a pond, but make sure it is large enough for
them or they will mess it up - I am guessing an acre sized pond would be
large enough for a small gaggle like this.
The geese will need protection from predators. If you don't have a dog
for protecting them, then they can be trained to return to a pen each
night, but that will take some work on your part. We can give you some
good pointers on how to do that. I would not recommend a gaggle of less
than four as they need a minimum size group to help each other keep
watch. We use a combination of guiennas, geese, chickens, and dogs to
help each other keep watch on the farm and we have very low losses due
to predators with this diversity of eyes, ears, and noses (yes, when one
species 'alarms' the others take notice).
We are asking $200 for the flock of four. There are very few sources of
grown, experienced geese unless you steal them from town lake or
something like that. And I really don't know why as these animals are
so useful and require so little feed or housing, and offer so much to
the small homesteader. .
You can contact Marjory at marjory@gvtc.com if you want to buy this
gaggle. .