My Garden: Guinea Fowl For The Garden

Today begins a new adventure for On The Home Front. We picked up six baby guinea fowl! You may remember my post last year about Japanese Beetles and the number of them we have in our garden. I don’t like to use chemicals in the garden and other than picking the beetles off the plants by hand I haven’t had great luck getting rid of the pests.

After doing some reading I decided to try raising some guinea fowl. Apparently they don’t scratch like chickens do and will do a good job at eating the bugs in the garden. We have plenty of room for the guinea fowl to roam around so we decided to give it a try.

One of the books recommended to me was called Gardening with Guineas written by Jeannette S. Ferguson. I found it to be a very informative book about raising guinea fowl on a small scale. Of course reading the book and experiencing raising them for myself can be quite different. I will let you know how our experience turns out!

I was most excited to learn that guineas not only eat ticks but also mosquitos, Japanese Beetles and weed seeds. They will certainly find plenty to eat in our yard.

We have set up a box for the guineas in our garage with a heat lamp. Like baby chicks they need a warm protected space to spend their first 8 weeks. They will be fully mature by the time they reach 12-15 weeks. I have heard if they are raised with chicks they can live together as adults. Since we also have six baby chicks we will eventually try keeping them together so they can eventually all live together in our chicken coop.