As I’ve noted before, we’ve begun the exciting adventure of homeschooling our girls. They’re still pretty young, but are learning fast. Our 5 year old is reading and spelling all kinds of words, and her sisters seem to be picking up things with her often. In my wife’s reading, she came upon the idea of keeping chickens as both an educational, and beneficial hobby. She mentioned it to me, and together we researched what it might look like for us, as city dwellers.
We soon found out, our city allows keeping a limited amount of poultry if:
1. The coop is at least 75 ft. from your neighbor’s home. (not garage)
2. They do not recommend roosters, due to noise. (fine with that, they don’t lay eggs)
3. They do not allow cock fighting. (shucks, okay.)
We’re still only in the beginning stages of keeping them, and our girls love having baby chicks around. Because it’s so cold outside, they don’t have full feathers yet, (and I haven’t built the coop yet), they’re indoors for now. But soon they’ll be outdoors, enjoying a nice cheaply assembled coop, reinforced against raccoons. By the end of summer, we hope to start getting eggs from them. Right now we have 2 ISA Brown’s, and hope to add 1 or 2 more Barred Rock’s when the farm store gets them in.
We’ve been purposeful with our girls, making sure they know that when these chickens stop giving us eggs, we’re probably going to eat them. So far they’re nodding in agreement, but when the time comes, we’ll see how we handle things. They’ve given them names, and no one took daddy’s suggestion of “Nugget”.
For now, it’s great to teach the girls to be gentle, and that God has given us His creation to take care of – and in return it helps take care of us. They wake up each morning, eager to pet the baby chicks, and watch them as they explore their current homemade habitat. Eventually I’m sure the novelty will wear off, but for now it’s pretty neat. And someday when we’re on vacation, we can offer free eggs to anyone who will come over to feed the hens. 🙂 Kinda cool.
words from wick 
Thanks for being a brave husband and trying something completely out of the norm (for city dwellers anyway)!
Impressive! Homeschooling really does open doors to learning that can’t be done in the typical educational environment. These will be memories they will cherish!
Great idea. We live a few miles outside of town, and really enjoyed raising 6 chicks that we got 2 years ago. It has been a fantastic experience for all 4 of our daughters. They have learned about creation, responsibility, and life and death (we now have only 2 chickens).
In fact, we’ve enjoyed it so much that we established, “Hill Haven Farm” and have ordered 45 chickens! (Are we crazy!?) We’ve got 6 acres and no close neighbors. Plenty of room in the barn. Our (almost) 13 year-old is looking forward to selling the eggs to earn spending money.
We’ll see how this goes…
dooood. 45 chickens!? That’s a lot of chicken poop. But a lot of eggs too…and it’s a “natural eggs” market out there!!