Homestead Guinea House
One of the first projects I built on our homestead was a house for our Guineas. Upon moving to our homestead four years ago, we were plagued with ticks. Hundreds of Thousands of them—Lone Star ticks, seed ticks, and chiggers. We could not go outside without getting attacked by ticks. My grandson hiked with me to the top of our mountain and it took my daughter an hour to get the ticks off of him.
I built a small 6 x 6 house with a small run. I acquired 12 adult guineas. I keep them locked up for about a month so they would forget their previous home. When I let them out, we began saying goodbye to the ticks and chiggers. Within a matter of months the ticks were almost gone. We have had several flocks of Guineas over the years, and today we are virtually tick free. This past spring and summer I only saw four ticks and they were on our cat.
Today the Guinea house is used about six months out of the year to quarantine chickens if needed, or for a few weeks if I get a new flock of Guineas, or if the chicken house gets overcrowded, and sometimes for feed storage.
What would a homestead be without the chatter of Guineas?
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Thanks for reading and up voting.
Yes, Guineas are great to kill off the tick population. I will be getting some for our homestead also, when we get to the buying animals.
I am in the same boat! Guineas will be a must have for our place...when we purchase them in the spring. We bought our place two months ago and within two days we had ticks attacking us. One somehow managed to crawl under my chin, nestling in my beard!!
We are literally just starting out and in the process of getting everything built for our fowl and livestock in the spring. So yes, any animal that is a productive member to the farm will be greatly implemented! Thank you @hansjurgen for this post and @basicstoliving for resteeming!