Making Home ProfitableSaint Maur, Kate V. (Kate Vandenhoff)
Science
Making Home Profitable
Saint Maur, Kate V. (Kate Vandenhoff)
Agriculture; Country life
A goose will lay from ten to twenty eggs and then want to sit; but if
you coop her in sight of her companions, four or five days will suffice
to break her up. If she lays a third clutch of eggs, let her keep them
and sit.
When the weather is mild, set five eggs under a hen; or, if she is
very large, seven might be risked. It takes from twenty-eight to
thirty days for goose eggs to hatch. As the skin is very tough, it is
well to sprinkle a little water around the nest, and even on the eggs
themselves, during the last two weeks, especially if the weather is
dry and hens are doing the incubating.
The youngsters need nothing for the first thirty-six hours. Then feed
scalded corn-meal--the coarsest kind--and wheat bran, chopped green
clover or young green oats cut fine, tops of green onions, lettuce
leaves or any tender young greens.
If the weather is fine, put the coop containing Biddy and her family
out on the grass, making a small yard in front for the first few days,
to prevent their wandering too far away. Move the coop and yard to a
new place as they eat the grass. Like young ducks, their drinking water
must be in a vessel that permits them to put the whole beak into the
water, or they are apt to get the air passages clogged up with soft
food, causing the gosling to smother; but on no account must they be
permitted to get their bodies into the water, as they chill and cramp
so easily.
It is much better to buy two- or three-year-old birds from a reliable
dealer for stock than obtain eggs for setting and wait for them to
develop. After the breeding season is over, geese and goslings need
little grain if on grass land. Late in the fall geese do well if turned
into the corn stubble or the orchard, where they will clean up all the
windfalls--which does much to stamp out grubs and insects.
PIGEONS AND SQUABS
When pigeons are kept for squab-raising it is one of the most
profitable ventures in which suburbanites or real country folks can
embark. The young are ready for market when four weeks old; the average
wholesale price is three dollars a dozen. Private customers will pay
forty cents a pair all through the winter months, and a good pair of
mature birds will raise two squabs every four weeks for nine months in
the year, which means that each old pair of birds should provide one
and one-half dozen squabs, which will market for four dollars and fifty
cents. The cost of keep is supposed to be fifty cents a year, but ever
allowing one dollar a year, there should be three dollars and fifty
cents clear profit.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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