We are intentional about keeping our political views separate from the farm, and I promise to continue to do this as best as I can going forward. But I don’t know how to share this week without saying this first…
We have witnessed injustice and we are, as a greater community, grieving. I want you to know that during this time, especially, Greg and I are listening and we are learning. And we are committed to taking action to support Black Lives Matter.
The newsletter this week is light-hearted, but it’s not intended to be a distraction to forget about the current events. This is a story of joy and I hope that we can hold both – the grief and the joy – in our open hearts this week.
Our first year farming, a friend gave us a goose. We had a fox problem at the time, and our hope was that this goose would stand guard and help protect our chickens.
It sounded like a foolproof plan to me, though I knew next to nothing about farming at the time. But, we encountered a few problems immediately. For starters, this goose didn’t seem to have a protective bone in his body. And his goose girlfriend, who came with him, wasn’t any better.
When the female goose laid her first egg, we were amazed. After marveling at its size – easily 4 times the size of our usual chicken eggs – Greg decided to do what he does with other eggs from the farm. He fried it, over-easy and it was a rookie culinary mistake for all the reasons you’re envisioning.
Goose eggs, we quickly learned, were not our cup-of-tea. So we decided it would be best to have nature take its course and let the eggs hatch. We relocated the geese, moving them away from the hens they were supposed to protect and into a new paddock in the backyard.
Greg built them a little wooden house and gave them a kiddie pool shaped like a turtle, and set up a fence around them. They ate our dandelions and pooped everywhere and mated a lot.
Greg said it would be temporary, “just until the goslings hatch,” and
Google told me what would come next…she’d build a nest, lay a small clutch of eggs, sit on them for about a month and then the fuzzy little goslings would arrive. How delightful!
We watched as she made her nest and started laying those eggs – 18 to be exact – but she would not sit. During this time, we were shocked to see that the male finally developed those protective instincts we had been looking for months ago.
On second thought, protective, might not be the best word to describe his behaviors. He hissed and flapped his wings when we walked out of the house and charged at us and our friends. He was anything but pleasant. Basically, he was vicious and hated our guts and if I hadn’t known better, I would have thought he had an avian version of rabies.
But still, no sitting. We saw the weather forecast one night – temperatures in the low 20s that would surely freeze those eggs – and we had to intervene! After all, the little goslings we envisioned roaming the farm would never come to fruition if the eggs froze solid.
We lost hope that these geese would ever be as interested in growing their brood than they were mating in the pool, so we devised a plan. We would need to get around the vicious male and the indifferent female and steal the eggs. And then we’d either need to find a way to incubate the eggs ourselves or replace them the next morning and continue waiting.
Stealing eggs from geese that were biologically hard-wired to protect these eggs was no easy feat. It involved careful planning, decoys, and collaboration. And I promise to tell ya all about it next week…..
Your Farmers,
Jenney & Greg