Hi Creagan, I saw this thread before Christmas and made a note to reply after Christmas day once we'd had our goose!
Ages for buying are just the same as chickens really - everything from eggs to day-olds to off-heat etc, and paying correspondingly more the older they get. If you have the gear for brooding them, day-olds are very easy to keep.
Just watch to make sure they have enough space, and that none of them get bullied (watch for bald patches where fluff has been pecked away).
Also make a conscious decision re whether you want them to imprint on you or not. We found this sort of behaviour fun for a couple of days, but soon realised it wouldn't be quite so entertaining with fully grown geese, so we nipped it in the bud pronto!:
In the end it turned out they were imprinted on my muck boots and not on me, so all I had to do was wear different coloured wellies for a month and that sorted it!
Oh, and they'll talk about you behind your back too
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If you buy from a large hatchery, they'll be able to sex them at a day old (if you miss your chance then, it's hard to be sure until they're nearly adults).
Ours are commercial embden type geeese which we bought through
Craigievern Poultry in Drymen a couple of years ago. Apart from their tendency to
gnaw through things, they've been ridiculously easy to keep. We bought them at Easter, and by the end of the summer they were about 3/4 grown, fed on mostly grass:
We ate or swapped most of these two Christmasses ago, but retained a trio for breeding. This was very successful, and the next year the girls each laid one egg every two days from March to July.
Here's the tricky bit though - The biggest of ours this year came in at 3kg dressed weight, and the smallest 2.25kg. They were lovely and lean, with hardly any fat over the breasts. However, our local farm shop sells geese between 4kg and 6kg, and I don't know how he does it!
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I have no idea whether theirs are a different breed, or just fed differently, so I'd love to hear comments on this. For instance, do I need to bring in some meatier birds to cross with ours, or should I change breed entirely? Any thoughts?