The geese are here! Yesterday was a busy day, first a visit to our woods by an expert forestier. Monsieur Girard from the Centre Régional de la Propriété Forestière arrived to advise us on possible strategies for our wood. I’ll expand on that very useful visit in future blogs.
After that, we returned home for a cup of tea and then set off to collect the ten geese we’d ordered: five grey Toulouse and five white Embden “growers”. After the stress of the move, they seemed to settle in very quickly. They will stay in their fox and rat proof shed for three days to habituate themselves to that being their new home, then come out into the field for just an hour the first day, working up gently to spending full days out eating the grass, with a shelter from wind and sun and surrounded by electrified netting to protect them from foxes. They will, however, continue to spend their nights safely locked up in the shed.
From a permaculture point of view, the geese are here to eat grass and so avoid most of the necessity to mechanically mow from now on; the outputs will be happy geese, meat for the table at Christmas, breeding stock for next year, a huge amount of entertainment and pleasure in the keeping, oh, and loads of noise: they’re already behaving like a crowd of teenage kids!
When writing our permaculture blog, We're torn between wanting to put loads of information in yet not wanting to make each entry too long. So, we’ll try to keep the posts comfortably short but please post a comment if you want to ask a question or want us to expand on a point.
