Farming For Self-Sufficiency
(Page 4 of 7)
November/December 1974
Copyright © 1973 by John and Sally Seymour. Introduction copyright © 1973 by Schocken Books. Inc.
When you have your baby geese, waddling along behind their foster mother the hen, or their real mother the goose, feed them well at first on some meal and protein, but when they are teenage geese they will begin to eat grass. They will live quite well on grass and grow all summer. No goose should be eaten before Michaelmas, but it is then justifiable to celebrate with a Michaelmas goose. Straight off grass he will be 'green,' he will not have 'solidity' in him. He won't be fat. Let the others go on running out on grass, with no more than the merest handful of corn to lure them in at night, until three weeks before you want to kill them. Some people say two weeks, or even ten days, but three weeks is quite enough. Then you must pen them and give them as much barley as they can eat. If you are going to kill them (or sell them) for Christmas, don't forget they have got to hang for at least a week. Geese are very easy things to keep; they never get ill; and if you don't want to worry about setting their eggs under hens, they're very good at hatching them out themselves, only you won't get so many geese. But after all, if a family eats half a dozen geese in a year it eats a lot of geese, and that is only half a clutch, so you don't need many geese unless you want to sell them.
RELATED CONTENT
DUCKS
Ducks are not very good mothers. In the domesticated state, in fact, I can't think of worse. They will drag their poor little chicks through the rough and the wet, lead them down to a muddy ditch, and before you know where you are they're all dead. Hens hatch duck eggs out much better than ducks do, but if the ducks do do it then you must keep the ducks in coops, those old-fashioned hen coops where bars in front keep the mother inside while the babies can get out and run about. If you hatch ducks out under hens you must not let the ducklings go near the water: they lack the oil in their feathers that a mother duck would have given them and catch cold. Young ducks, in fact, should not be let go near water at all, until they become teenage. They need plenty of clean water to drink, of course, as indeed every living thing does. Feed them much as you would chickens.
When you want to eat your surplus cockerels, or ducks for that matter, it is a good idea to give them ten days fattening on barley meal mash before you kill them. Mix the mash with skimmed milk if you have it. If you don't bother to do this they also taste very good.
TURKEYS
Turkeys thrive very well in the absence of hens, but if they run with hens you have got to medicinate their water or food with some stuff that protects them from blackhead, which they catch from the hens. They are tenderer as to climate than other poultry, and need shelter in bad weather. They eat what hens eat, but more of it.
SHEEP
Now we come to sheep, and must hope that these animals will not object to being thrown in with a lot of cackling poultry. Sheep are a very good thing to keep, for the self-supporter. For a sheep is of a size—a fat lamb is anyway—that makes it possible to eat him, in the winter at any rate, before the meat goes bad. If you can share your sheep between, say, four families, it means that each family gets one very good joint, either a leg or a shoulder, and a share of the ribs. Sheep live and fatten on grass. Don't even make demands on your hay unless the ground is covered with snow (and even then they won't eat hay unless they have previously learnt to); they are thus cheap to keep. Ewes only have one or two lambs at a time though, unlike sows which have a dozen or more, so their rate of increase is not high.
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