New Life, New Noise!

A couple of people have asked me how the gosling is getting on. He is very sweet and has become very attached to our 15 yr old son - or perhaps it's the other way around! I took him out of the incubator after 24 hours; our house is always on the colder side of no heat at all and I thought the incubator would at least keep him warm. I then transferred him to a box and put him next to the Everhot where again, he was snug as a bug.

However, he has grown in both strength and stature at an alarming rate. I realised the box was too small when I caught him trying to jump out of it. In addition, the noise...oh the NOISE! Cheep, Cheep, Cheep, Cheep. All day, all day. And I do spend a lot of time in the kitchen! So yesterday we bought in the pen we made for baby chickens and put him in there in the playroom - next to the kitchen so I can still hear the noise but it is one step removed from the oven! He wasn't pleased at all but seems to be resigned to his new home. In the meantime, the second egg has started to hatch and perhaps tomorrow or Friday there will be two of them in there together - I just hope the bigger one doesn't bully his baby brother!

One thing that is worrying us - and if anyone has experience we'd be grateful for advice - is when to put them outside and introduce them to water. I feel that for the next month it will be too cold but I'm well aware that if they had a goose mum they'd be wandering around already and probably following her onto the moat. So, any ideas? Max thinks we should start with the bath but I've told him if I catch him in the bath with a real live goose I'll post a picture on here!

New Year, New Life

Needless to say, when push comes to shovel I prefer to be a warm weather gardener which isn't very good if you are trying to be self-sufficient! However, we are enjoying enormously the fruits of our 2008 labours: vegetables from the freezer, apples still in the boxes and of course pork in the freezer. We also have a number of chickens in the freezer as we had a large number of cockerels and, finally, we have been given a leg of wild boar by the local gardien de chasse. And of course we are getting plenty of eggs from the hens.

At the end of last year I put some onions and garlic in the vegetable plot and now it's about time to plant the next lot of onions. But it's so cold out there that the motivation factor is dreadfully low! However, we have started to prepare the new potato plot. Against all advice we have rotavated this area and I am quite certain that we will be regretting this for a fair few years as all the chopped up roots of bindweed come back to haunt us. But Max can't dig at the moment (he's just had his carpal tunnel operation) and I dug so much last year that I just couldn't face it. So out came the rotavator.

We still need to fence this second vegetable plot area. We have a large rabbit population here and I am not happy to plant one for me and twenty for them. So the fence is on the "to do" list. We have, however, bought our potatoes and onions for planting and this year I'm also going to plant some Jerusalem Artichokes. I thought I would put them at the end of the pigs' enclosure so that when I've dug them up the pigs can take whatever I've missed.

But things have been happening up the garden path despite my laziness. To our astonishment one of the hens became broody over Christmas. We found her tucked away in an outhouse between the drying machine and the wall, well hidden and out of the wind but still very cold. We left her alone and on 24 January she suddenly appeared with four chicks. (That mean that she kept them warm in temperatures of -10 degrees during the night and not much warmer during the days.) Sadly, only one of the chicks survived beyond three days but it is wonderful to go out and see them wandering around the yard, mother hen gently lifting her wing whenever the chick needs to warm up or get away from some terrifying object; a human being for example!

Soon after Christmas also we were given two goose eggs, one at the beginning of the week and one a few days later. We put them both into the incubator on the days that they were given - in other words there was a gap of about five days. This morning I was tidying up the room and suddenly noticed one of the eggs had a hole in it. On further inspection I heard wonderful squeaking noises and sure enough a couple of hours later the gosling popped out. I might say that he (well, he's a he until he proves otherwise!) is a lot stronger than the chicks we've hatched and a lot bigger too!

An hour old

Two hours later

I have left the second egg in the incubator in the hope that it will hatch in a few days time.

So there's new life at Gennetay and very soon it will be warm enough even for me to stop making excuses and "get out there".