Relaxed Farming - our farm in your classroom

This is Victoria, our FOURTH turkey to go broody - except she wants to be broody on her terms only. She has been coming into the barn and laying an egg every day for a good week or so but her chosen place, in one of the poultry winter nest boxes, is not the ideal place as it is a good meter off the ground. This is rather a drop for hatching chicks (!!!) so, we have been removing the eggs and hoping she might find somewhere else.
Each day however, she has carried on laying in the same place plus she has been staying with the egg for longer and longer and today we found her sitting not only on her own egg, but also on three chicken eggs she had stolen. Yep, she was definitely broody! We decided to give in and give her a dozen or so turkey eggs (ones we had been saving for Katherine) and come up with a plan nearer the time as to how to stop the emerging chicks falling out of the box. Victoria however, had other ideas and after we removed the chicken eggs, filled the box with lots more lovely soft woodshavings and put all the turkey eggs inside for her... she then decided to abandon the nest altogether.
We retrieved her twice and put her back in, only for her to get back out again pretty pronto (the photos show escape number two). We left her perching in the barn with a cross look on her face whilst we collected the eggs and put them in with Elizabeth and Josephine. Too late we realised however, we should have marked the eggs with a different colour as of course these new eggs will hatch around four days after the ones originally put under Josephine - and we expect that as they are nest sharing, they will now all get mixed up!!! Hey Ho!
As for Victoria, we will now leave her to it and if she wants to carry on laying her own eggs and then incubate those in the raised nest boxes, we will simply let her!! We know when we are beaten!!!