Relaxed Farming - our farm in your classroom

It is all very busy on the poultry front at the moment whilst with the larger animals it is definitely the calm before the storm. Onion, one of our Pygmy goats, is due to kid in one week's time and within just three weeks she is followed by two of the others (Sage and Thyme) plus all three dairy goats: exciting (and always nerve-wracking) times ahead!!
Onion is HUGE as the first photo shows: she is on the left, with Pepper (her son from last year) in the middle and her adopted daughter Garlic on the right. Parsley is just visible the other side of the hurdle. Onion is practically as wide as she is tall and spends lot of time sitting back on her haunches, presumably to take some of the weight off her legs. The middle photo is of Onion with Pepper when he was just a week or so old. Seriously sweet!!
Back to the poultry: the turkeys are proving fun, Victoria and Camilla are no longer broody, we kept moving them off their nests and shutting up the houses they had been in and it really did not take long for them to be back to normal and laying (just three-four days).
NOW however, Katherine, our Bourbon Red is broody. She has been stuck fast to her chosen nest site for three days (even when we locked her out of the house she was in she went straight back as soon as we re-opened the door again) and so we have decided to give her some eggs and see how she does. This evening we took her eight turkey eggs (possibly potentially fertile still following Napoleon's departure) and three guinea fowl eggs. The latter are from a neighbour who has a pair of guinea fowl she rescued last year as chicks and the female of which has now started laying. We helped her to clip their wings a while back and so the eggs are a thank you present.
We have no idea how many of these 13 eggs will prove fertile and if any of them make it to the hatching stage we may well have to take them away from Katherine as turkeys are not known to make great mothers. Elizabeth did a brilliant job of hatching 15 out of 16 eggs for us two years ago but on the first night she put herself away in a house and left most of the chicks out in the cold and the next day she trod on one and killed it!!! They have to be better than this in the wild???