At what age and time of year do geese start laying eggs?

[Siena]

Just had a quick search around the site and couldn't see anything answering this one. I got a gander and goose a couple of days ago. They are one year old and I was just wondering when I could expect to get eggs from them. Is the the wrong time of year? I know nothing about geese - it was a bit of an impulse buy!

[rickkerri]

Hi I think you would have been very lucky to get any eggs now, they only lay from about mid feb to mid may at the latest
your have to wait till next year or its goose for the pot

[Millymollymandy]

I don't know anything about geese either but I don't understand the previous posting saying they only lay for certain months of the year. Sounds a bit strange. I have ducks and they lay all year round. By the way your gander won't lay any eggs!

[rickkerri]

I know it sounds strange, it is one of the reasons that you cannot intensivley rear geese in that whilst they are monogamous and pair off all year they actually will only mate and lay eggs in the spring. Each goose will only lay about 25 eggs a year and thats your lot. The Gander at this time can become very aggressive so beware, we call ours Adolf.

[Shirley]

What the others have said - it is strange when you compare them to ducks and chooks though, isn't it.

Agree with comments re the aggressive gander - when the goose is ready to lay he gets incredibly protective - you have to show who is boss and not appear frightened by him or he'll just chase you all the time. Our current gander is now extremely protective as our goose is sitting on eggs.

[Millymollymandy]

What happens if you just have females and no ganders? Will they lay more eggs then?

[rickkerri]

They won't lay any more eggs than if you had a gander present - obviously the only difference is they won't be fertile so nothing will hatch. When our goose was laying we kept taking a few eggs off of her for incubating and also to use for cooking as they are really nice as an omlette, scrambled or used in a cake. Once she starts sitting on them its quite hard to remove them unless you are quite crafty - we managed to sneak in and get a couple to check thay were fertile, unfortunately ours althought were fertile had not developed properly as she was not a very good sitter, but we did managed to convince her that her eggs had hatched and she adopted a couple of day old goslings and ducklings that had just hatched from the incubator! We have some lovely goslings now and are still learning daily about keeping them!

[Millymollymandy]

I wish my ducks would only lay like that cos I'd like to get more hens as I'm down to only two - one oldie and a younger one who still lays - but as my 3 ducks lay all year round and too many for us to eat I can't get any more hens because I've no-one to give the eggs away to (everyone round here has hens).