The original natural family living magazine, founded in 1976. Reader-supported
and trusted by thinking people around the world who want positive alternatives
to high cost, high consumption lifestyles for themselves and their families.
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||
|
from Natural Life magazine, March/April
2009 Do-it-yourself learning meets do-it-yourself food
“Shhh,” he said to our daughters. “Listen. What sound do you hear in the box?” There was only a short silence before we heard scratching and peeping through the cardboard. As he slowly removed the loose lid, our four new Ameraucana chickens were revealed: two pale yellow with spots, two with stripes and all of them as small as the eggs from which they hatched just three days before. Ameraucanas are a breed of chicken with fluffy cheek and chin feathers and that lay eggs with tinted shells; purebred hens lay blue eggs, while non-purebred hens might lay eggs of blue, green, olive or even lavender tints. On that evening, however, they were just tiny balls of fluff that started a wonderful adventure for our family. In each stage of their development from newly hatched chicks to laying their first eggs, the chickens were an experiential learning opportunity like no other. Like many families, ours is part of the growing movement of people who prefer to eat local, sustainable food and to teach our children the importance of those choices. Eggs are an example of something easily purchased from a case in any grocery store, often originating from a large commercial enterprise, but that can be had for the same or lower cost by keeping some hens in a backyard coop. Even if the cost for a dozen eggs works out the same for organic, (outdoor) free-range eggs from either source, there is a priceless benefit that can’t be found in the store: seven months of learning while watching those little fluff balls grow up into a small flock of chickens right in the backyard.
The night the chicks came home with my husband, we held and snuggled them briefly before putting them into the brooder box in the kitchen. Our children, then ages six and two, had spent the previous two weeks helping to make the brooder, crawling in and out of it, pretending to nest in it, taking it apart and putting it back together again. They dug their hands into bags of organic chick feed, pine shavings and grit, feeling the differences in texture. We encased the box with plastic baby-gate sections to... To read the rest of this article, subscribe to Natural Life's digital edition, which includes access to this and other back issues. Sarah Miner lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and best friend Jim and their two daughters Ashley-Rose (7) and Carina (3). |
|||||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||
My husband was mobbed when he came through the door one evening
in late February. The kids and I had been waiting all day for what was in the
box he carried under one arm, and he came home to a greeting worthy of a rock
star. 
