We Bought a Farm: Double yoke goose egg

Top row: chicken eggs

Middle row: duck eggs

Bottom row: goose eggs

We are swimming in eggs around these here parts lately. We collect about 40 chicken eggs a day. We usually get 4-6 ducks eggs a day. And lately, we've been getting a few goose eggs. Goose eggs are more uncommon as they aren't laid regularly like duck and chicken eggs are. But we've been getting a few. Check out the photo above. The goose egg on the left is the sized egg we've been getting now and then. But yesterday, I snagged a HUGE GOOSE egg. (I put a sharpie next to it for comparison purposes.)

Everyone in the family was excited to see what happened when we cracked that "goose egg." We have two breeds of goose here on the farm: Pilgrim and Toulouse. We weren't sure if it belonged to our bigger breed of goose (Toulouse) or if it was a double yoke. 

The moment of truth:

A double yoke goose egg! JB cracked a chicken egg above it so you could get some size comparison. Is that not something else?

Speaking of geese, we have decided to try and let our geese raise young. We have "released" them into the wild. (I hope to post a video of that soon.) We have put them on one of our ponds. The Toulouse geese cannot mate very well on land (because they are so large) and the only place we had seen the Pilgrim geese mating was in their small water container -- so we knew they needed water to get the job done. 

Since geese basically pair for life and can live decades, the idea would be to allow them raise young that would then be processed for food. (I know this is hard to think about it, but around these parts, feeding organically is expensive! The animals must be providing us with food or money in order to be able to keep them and keep feeding them high quality food.)

JB has been working on nesting boxes and one set of our Toulouse geese have already paired off and made their own nest outside of a box.

Our geese as babies.

The Pilgrim geese. We have three of these remaining -- one male and two females. (Unfortunately, just last week, our other male got tangled in fencing and died.) We are going to see if the one male will take on two wives. If not, we may say good bye to one girl.

One of our Toulouse geese. These guys are huge and cannot even come close to flying.