You are what you eat....

A few weeks ago I ordered a fabulous book from amazon called "Made from scratch, Discovering the pleasures of a handmade life" by Jenna Woginrich and wouldn't you know her first chapter is on raising Chickens! This is a gal after my own heart and even as someone who grew up raising farmyard animals, I still learn so much as my experience with them goes on. I don't know why it never occurred to me that even if you are raising your own backyard flock, if they don't eat an organic diet, it doesn't mean they're giving you organic eggs just because they're in your backyard and dining off the grasses of the lawn or the greens in your garden (like mine)....It's worth the little extra money to buy organic feed for the animals you're raising, I'll leave it up to you to extend that to family pets, I'm not about to go out and change the food of my dog and cats but then again I'm not consuming anything from those animals either.... Eggs are something that should be organic and free range and fresh and healthy from a healthy hen who has access to greens and grass and dirt and all the other benefitting factors of a natural environment including organic grains to help fill in the gaps from which she might be missing from a free range diet. For those of you who know me personally know how I am about Organic, I'm a big advocate for Locavore and Organic (Locavore is a person who consumes foods that are grown/raised locally and seasonally)

Over the weekend my cat got a wrapper from some sort of organic fruit snack that one my children had unwrapped and dropped on the ground. After finally discovering he did in fact have something stuck in his throat and that I wasn't going to be able to just dig my fingers in and fish it out, I took him to the ER vet and the poor baby had to be sedated to get it removed. The vet came out and showed me the piece of wrapper he had found and asked if it looked familiar....yep right across this corner piece of wrapper were big green letters reading "ORGANIC"....at least he was trying to eat healthy :-) A friend of mine said "Kara's cat for sure" after finding out about the organic wrapper and we can all laugh about it now that my cat is feeling better and organic wrapper free. Organic is a word that is being really overly used right now but "Natural" has become a some what negative word, Organic is the only word that we have for how things should be raised/grown and when I read this morning from my book about how normal "natural" chicken feed is processed and treated with chemicals and pesticides, it clicked that the diet I feed my chickens matters if I want to have organic fresh healthy eggs coming from my hens. It makes sense to raise babies on Organic feed so that those babies grow into healthy hens. Right now we used a purina brand laying feed and chick starter which is treated with antibiotics.....

My husband broke my chick water feeder yesterday while refilling the chicks water so first thing I had to do today was go buy a new one. Usually when I go to my feed store and need chicken feed I just holler out that I need some lay pellets and some guy brings it out to my car for me while I pay at the register. It never occurred to me that they might have organic lay feed so I browsed around a little more today and found that they do indeed have organic lay feed so I bought a bag. My girls aren't laying right now but they should start up again pretty soon and when they do, they'll be giving me ORGANIC eggs :-)

The kids are in their "Teenage" stage now, baby fluff is falling out and being replaced by little feathers and they're looking really ratty these days. They've also discovered the hutch and love to sleep in it at night. Sunny of course led the pack, she was the first to climb the ladder and the first to get a cozy spot inside the hutch.

It didn't take the rest long to follow her lead and find that they too like the cozy feel of a hutch at night to sleep in. It's kinda cute how they sit by the door and look out. Inside is a little roosting bar that is raised a few inches off the floor and I'm sure it won't be long before they figure out that they like to roost on the bar. My babies are growing up fast!