Grass and geese?

[pullet 123]

I have noticed that geese make very good lawn mowers, but also very good mud makers...i want to have grass in my goose pen but they seem to eat in in days. any suggestions on how i can keep grass with geese? thanks

 

[Oregon Blues]

Have a gigantic pen and very few geese.

They eat grass and will graze it down so close they will kill it if they don't have enough grass.

 

[gardenfairy]

If it's a small area, they will indeed decimate the grass and there isn't much you can do about that aside from provide them with a larger area or rotate the area. We've found that even ducks, which are vastly smaller and less grass focused, quickly massacre the grass in a even a decent-sized pen.

If you're needing to keep your geese in a rather small pen, which we did when ours were babies to protect them from the eagles, you pretty much have to abandon the idea of grass. While ours were in the pen area, we let them eat the grass that was there and then when it was turned to mud, covered the area with straw. That also made it easier to clean out since you can get a lot of dropping buildup in a pen (especially if you have big geese like ours), which then can just be shoveled out and new straw laid in.

To supply them with grass during that time, we were constantly starting flats of grass seed (just a standard pasture mix) and gave them new flats to mow through each day. You could also bring them small grass clippings if you have other areas of grass away from the goose pen. So basically, you can bring the grass to them if you don't have enough area to let them graze on their own.