community.

This year I had the privilege of meeting two very wonderful women, named Beki and Tina, who live no more than a 20-minute walk west of us in a pretty neighborhood. They have an enormous backyard and a couple weeks ago at an open-mic night, Tina said the magical words, "I want to have a communal garden in my backyard." My heart melted with joy. Even though I am planning a garden, it is another part of my dream to have a community of other growers in alliance with me - to share with, to trade with, to learn with. 

When I lived in Maryland, I was fortunate enough to have a boss at the state park who was a small-scale farmer. She let us help her (ok, she paid us, but she really didn't have to because we all jumped at the chance to help her) create raised beds on her sloping backyard, concoct a fertile mixture of composts and soil in said boxes, and reap the benefits of her harvest: her wife cooked us amazing meals using their own vegetables (and some wineberry pie that could make them millionaires were they to start selling it). My boss started her seeds indoors as well and had a coldframe, which helped to extend her season.

Besides that I had a sweet summer gig working part-time for another organic farmer. She had a mere five acres and supplemented with produce from a neighboring, bigger farm, but the woman made a bloody killing at the farmer's market. I helped her both in the fields and at the market and was bitten by the organic gardening bug. 

If you have never experienced this phenomena, please, PLEASE go to your local farmers market this summer and try fresh produce. Having been brought up strictly in the grocery stores with their weeks' old produce from foreign countries, I had no idea that a store-bought pepper could taste any different than one fresh from the fields. I could not have been more wrong. I was hooked. I was also introduced to fresh strawberries, which was a new concept. I thought all strawberries were behemoths that were almost crunchy and had tasteless white insides. When I tasted my first strawberry right out of the dirt, I could have wept. Soft, red on the inside, and sweet, sweet, sweet - I ate so many that summer that I was sick of strawberries by August.

Working with Tina will be my first experience as a fellow farmer sharing in, well, whatever it is we'll share in. My main focus at the moment is that she's interested and willing to develop a chicken coop in her backyard and maintain a flock of egg-producers. If you have never had farm-fresh eggs, I encourage you to try those as well (along with fresh strawberries). I told her we'll go in for all the chicken whatnot because I am a diehard fan of fresh organic eggs and it's a step closer to self-sufficiency and independence from grocery stores.

The chicken situation in America is the focus of a great deal of controversy right now. An average grocery store has those eggs for at least two or three weeks before you even get to them, so they're already 'old'. Most eggs that are cheap come from factory-farms where chickens are contained in a 12x12 inch cage. They are kept in daylight-like conditions most if not all of the year to encourage them to keep producing. This not only strains their bodies, but the confinement and constant sunlight is stressful to their brains. They are also fed a steady diet of grain, which is not natural - so they are actually producing eggs that have fewer vitamins and less health benefits. The chickens are not healthy, and they are certainly not happy, if you care about that sort of thing (which I do). They cannot exercise or forage, and when they naturally stop producing eggs, they are starved by the "farmers" until their bodies go into emergency mode and produce more eggs. 

Now, the tricky part is that there's very little standard for what you can put on an egg carton, except for the "organic" labe. Organic means that they are fed organic grain, not that they are necessarily allowed to roam and forage on their own. Many eggs cartons will say, "Free-range" or "Cage-free," but even this is misleading - because there are no federal standards for what these terms really mean, it is likely that the chickens are foraging on the floor of a warehouse. They may not be caged, but they are not allowed access outside - where sunlight gives them access to valuable Vitamin D and access to grass allows them to forage for protein-rich insects.

It's a tricky situation. At the very least, purchasing "organic" eggs with "free range" markings on the carton is a better bet than the regular grocery-store eggs. Not only are you purchasing healthier eggs but you are telling the grocery store (and therefore the market as a whole) that you do not accept the abusive practices of most egg-producing "farms." These eggs are often three or four times the price of the cheapest ones in the grocery store, but as a test, I encourage you to buy one of each. Take them home and in two separate bowls, open an egg from each. The organic and potentially uncaged chickens will produce an egg with a thick albumen (clear part) and an orange-golden yolk. The factory farm eggs will be dull and limp because they come from unhealthy chickens. It is truly worth the money. 

And if you're adventurous, you can look up local farms in your area to see who sells eggs. Then you can visit the farm and ask to see the chickens. Here in Bend, Jim Fields runs a farm and he'll gladly show you his beautiful ladies - they have their own penthouse and a protected area for picking at the ground. He tosses them kitchen scraps which they eat up with great relish as most livestock will do. Jim's chickens' eggs are some of the best I have ever tasted - he sells them just a day or so after collecting them from what I understand, so you're getting them right out of the henhouse.

These are just some of the reasons I'm peeing my pants with excitement to help Tina raise chickens. Besides that, it will just be so damn fun to bike over to their house and visit our collective hens and bike back home with a dozen fresh eggs for breakfast.