Gardening with Guineas: A Step-By-Step Guide to Raising Guinea Fowl on a Small Scale

The book gives a clear understanding on how to care and raise guinea fowl from hatching, brooding, nesting, and directing them where you want them to go or not go. It is also an easy read.

An easy read and informative. The book did not prepare me for how dumb Guineas are, however. We babied our keets for the recomended time under a heat lamp and slowly introduced them to the coop and their new surroundings. I even bell trained them, like the author suggested, for mealtimes. Infortunately, I lost several over the 1st few weeks, because they could not find their way back to the coop! May be I just got a bad batch. With that being said, they are great gardeners. We live in central Kansas where the grasshoppers and ticks outnumber people expenentially, but we see very few on our property. Set a few feet off the property and the grasshoppers are thick!

I loved this book! I will put it in my reference collection for my own Guineas. We only have 5 Guineas, 3 hens and 2 cocks, with the info in the book we were able to tame our "babies" and the come to our call. They love to hang out with us when we are outside and are getting ready to start laying eggs soon. Without this book there is not a lot of info out there just for the Guinea Fowl lovers. I have large flower gardens and because we live in New Hampshire we also have a huge "Lyme Tick" problem. The guineas have already helped erase the grasshopper and Japanese beetle from our yard and here is the hope that they will live up to their names as "African Tick Birds". Thanks to the author we have them going home at a certain hour with out fail and they get right down to work. There is also a reference to how to tell if they are sick and that has come in handy. There was a lot of info and pictures so I was able to follow along with their development, and know I was raising them correct.I woul highly recommend this book as a go to source for raising Keets! and it highlights some of the funny anecdores that Guineas are reknown for. Enjoy!Daylily

Tells how to raise guineas in sufficient detail, which is almost identical to raising chickens.But virtually no information about gardening with guineas. I went online to the message board and discovered its flowers that the author grows with her guineas. Very tall flowers.VEGETABLES. I have french guineas and they havent eaten any vegetables but they do trample them. They will also tear out the vegetables so they can have a dust bath in my vegetable bed. So they destroy vegetables if given the chance. So saying they dont eat them is misleading. I have raised beds and they will jump up and run across the bed in preference to going around. I tried putting bird netting on hoops and they walked on the bird netting crushing the vegetables anyway. I would have had to use 6 ft of chicken wire bent over the hoops to have protected the vegetables. Then I would have had the time consuming job of removal for weeding. I use antiweed plastic to keep the weeds down but the guinneas tore holes in it so they could have a dust bath in the fine soil in my garden beads.They are picky about the bugs they like. I tried feeding them big one inch long grasshoppers when they were 4 months old and they wouldn't eat them. Too big? I tried to feed them a 2 inch cut worm when they were 14 months old and they wouldn't eat that either . They wont eat green cabbage worms either so they are worthless as pest eaters in the garden. So the book deceived on this subject also. So what good are they in my garden? Okay they will eat Japanese beetles but I have to knock them off the plants onto the ground for them to get them, almost as much work as knocking them into a pan of soapy water. i learned from the local feed store that its very hungry guinneas that will eat ticks and other bugs. So you have to feed them late in the evening or they wont do a very good job of getting the bugs. However, my free range guineas will sit on the front porch of my house and squawk until I feed them. They are too tame and have no fear of me. The book didn't warn that over domesticating them could be just as bad as having them too wild.SLUGS The book says they eat slugs NOT TRUE. They are insectivores and seed eaters. I tried grinding up slugs in their mash when they were young and they wouldnt eat the mash with 10% slugs added in. I talked to the local garden supply center in Northern New Hampshire and they confirmed that none of their customers guineas were eating the slugs. Same with snails. At 14 months old still total resistance to eating slug mash mixtures. Seems that in my area there are a few chicken varieties that will eat slugs but most wont. Ducks are the only consistent slug and snail predators.ANTI WEED plastic mulch. They love to tear it and scratch it up. I have to keep the guineas out of the garden because I depend on the anti weed fabric to control the weeds in our wet climate. I have now fenced the garden to keep them out.BLACK WINDOW SCREENING they try to peck holes in it so I had to put a 10 ft piece of chicken wire in front of my sliding screened doors.JUMPING I put a little 4 inch box in the coop because the Keates were jumping onto the feeder. Bad idea, one injured his leg (neurological injury). His toes would curl up so he couldn't walk. Had to put him down after 8 weeks. Hypericum 12x helped a little but not enough. The book said don't grab them by the legs but did not tell me to make sure they couldnt do any kind of jumping. I put a piece of stove pipe over the feeder bottle and over the water bottle so the others wouldn't try to jump up there and get hurt. The book could have suggested this but didn't. Now I have a second injured one because he couldn't flap sufficiently when his wings were wet to break the force of dropping 3 feet.THE ROAD They love parading down the center and stopping traffic. I thought they would be afraid of all the cars wooshing by at 40 mph. Nope. Nothing in the book to warn me about this trait. Seems it is warmer on the road and so more bugs live by the side of the road than in the fields.FEATHER PULLER The runt of the group started losing feathers in the second spring and was fighting with the dominant male. Thought it might be mites, but couldn't find any. I thought the other male was responsible. i mentioned this to someone else who had had guineas and they said you probably have a bird that is pulling others feathers out. Turns out that there is a female who is a feather puller and was pulling his feathers out at night so he developed sores on his back about 3 by 5 inches. At which point everyone tried to kill him. So I locked him up to protect him. But the feather pulling female started pulling feathers out of the back of another male. So I have had to put this feather pulling female in a separate dog carrier at night to protect all the others. Finally put plywood 10 by 12 inch dividers on the roost bar so she couldn't reach over an pull out feathers on the bird next to her. Again something not in the book that people with experience with guineas knew.THE ROOF The first year they flew onto my shingled roof and started pecking at the shingles and tearing out pieces. I got the garden hose hooked up and sprayed them with high pressure water every time they got up there the first summer I had them. Now they are 15 months old but aren't flying up to the roof anymore. I expect I have been feeding them too much and they are now too fat to easily fly.NOISE The second there is enough light they want to be out of the coop in the morning. If I don't get there soon enough they make a racket worthy of a rock band. I have neighbors 400 ft away. Its too close and they are complaining.TICKS They are not systematically combing the lawn for ticks as I expected them to. They run around the house and only get the bugs in this narrow runway. Maybe that's because I have their feeder out and its easier to eat grain than hunt for bugs. But if I don't have the feeder out they make a ruckus and don't stop until I give them their food. Now in the second summer year they are doing a better job of covering the lawn. But I tracked a tick into the house off the lawn yesterday proving they aren't doing a perfect job.FIELDS? They wont go in them, grass is too high. They want to hang out all day by the feeder and near to the injured male bird. They must hope they will be able to get at him and kill him. I have had zero bug patrolling since the male injured his leg and got put in a cage.FURNITURE They want to get on the furniture and the stone steps to the house and poop on them. I have a house not a farm.DOMINANT MALE ATTACKS OTHER MALESMaybe if I had a larger number of birds there would not have been such a problem but in small flocks there will be murder.EGGS If they free range the female will hide her eggs and then get broody and sit on the eggs at night rather than going into the coop. Then the predators come around and kill the female. I know someone who has lost most of her females guineas as a result. I have not gotten one egg all summer from my birds because of all the vegetation around the house allowing them to hide them. ( its been 3 summers and I have not gotten one egg yet from my one female. You have to lock them up in a fenced in area if you want eggs.I read the book before getting guineas and I do not think that a fair and honest picture was provided of what I was getting into. All the good aspects of guineas were presented and the bad minimized or not mentioned at all. I have never had birds before. I think the book was written for people who have chickens or ducks and wanted to diversify. I thought they were adorable as little Keats but now I think they are little monsters. If I had know then what I know now I would not have gotten guineas.So although this book may have more information than other books it is not exactly a full and complete disclosure of what these birds are like. I accept that there may be no other book as good as this one.

It all started with ducks, actually. Or maybe bugs. I hate June bugs all over my vegetable garden, and I'm not overly fond of other bugs, either. A place near where I work has all kinds of ducks wandering around, and I thought I'd borrow one to eat the June bugs. Then I remembered guineas. When I threw the idea out there, I thought my boyfriend would just ignore it, but he seemed interested, too. I started doing some research on the web and found Gardening with Guineas. We read through it, and picked through it, and now we have guineas. My boyfriend is not much of a reader, but he read Gardening with Guineas. It helped us decide that we could raise them. It is full of information on how to house them, how to train them, and how to take care of them. If you want guineas on a small scale, don't even get any birds until you read this book.

Great information. Very informative on several aspects of of raising guinea. A book I’ve had for a long time and still refer back to. Excellent for newbies or seasoned people.

I loved this book! It was well written for someone who knows absolutely nothing about Guineas. The author provides anecdotal solutions that work, and provides guidance on those techniques that don't work as well. It is almost like she is sitting at a kitchen table talking to a friend about her experiences raising Guineas. So it is a easy, enjoyable read, along with being very informative. With over a 100 trees and a horrible tick problem on my property I was told by two different exterminators that guineas or chickens are what I needed to take care of my problem. I was so dreading reading a book on how to get started, but this was so well written that I breezed through in no time.

Look forward to getting my own guineas in the spring.Remember the lady is in USA though, bird accommodation different in the UK.

Very useful guide, the most comprehensive that I have found. Full of practical information and observations.

enjoyed this book - nice and easy to read - covered all the basics with some nice personal touches.