We need a poultry round up. It is all getting very exciting. We now have the grand total of NINE turkey eggs: we still only have one of the females laying (we think Napoleona, although embarrassingly never manage to catch her at it..). It was the same last year though, she began first and it was a good 3/4 weeks before the others started. Their time will come, we aren't worried! Gloria has just started to lay again – she had stopped before the move to the barn for reasons unknown but has obviously decided the new living quarters are okay. We now have seven eggs in the nest from her and Guinevere and all four geese are getting pretty protective about them. We are still not sure whether we will take any away for the incubator and hope they carry on laying or just let them go broody on these ones - plus any others they continue to lay. Last year we had just over 40 eggs from our two females. West Of England geese can lay 20-50 a year so we were very much at the bottom end of this. We have had 27 so far this year so there should be a lot more laying to go yet!
On the duck front we have two ducks/chickens sitting on 13/14 eggs each and a further three sets of eggs in various nest boxes/area which are still being laid into. We don’t want to hatch that many ducklings this year for ourselves but because we still need to sell four of the ducks, we have hit upon the idea of selling them with ducklings in tow!! The plan would be to wait for the ducklings to be a good few days old so we can enjoy that first week or so – we will have to see how this idea pans out.
And then there are the chickens and there we need a plan as to what we want to hatch and when – we expect any hatching we do will be from our own coloured eggs.
Photo is of Queenie and her daughter