Do-It-Yourself Easter Eggs

by Jill Richardson · 2009-04-08 21:02:00 UTC
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Last year, I brought a hardboiled green egg to work as a snack. When I showed it to my co-workers, they asked if I dyed it green. Nope. "How come it's green?" they asked. I told them it came from a green chicken. The truth is that chickens lay eggs in a variety of different colors - including green. And they are relatively easy to raise at home. So if you thought this post was about how you can buy eggs from the store and dye them, I'm sorry to disappoint you :)

Step one for any would-be chicken owner is to check with your municipality to make sure it's legal to keep chickens. A friend in Madison, WI got a few chickens and she had to get a chicken license from the city. In San Diego, the law states that chickens must be a certain number of feet from any house. If chickens aren't allowed in your city, see if you can get the law changed!

After you're sure of the rules, then you can start checking out sites like BackyardChickens.com (which has a great Raising Chickens 101 page for new or would-be chicken owners). Decide if you'd like to hatch eggs yourself, or if you'd rather buy already-hatched chicks. After watching my mom's nerve wracking experiences hatching chicks with her preschool class, I would probably just buy day-old chicks - but if you have small children, it might be neat to get some eggs and let them learn about how chicks hatch. If, for some reason, your eggs don't hatch, you can buy day-old chicks as a back up plan (my mom's had to do that with her preschool class before... most years at least some of the chicks hatch but one year she got absolutely zero).

If you really want to have some pastel-colored Easter eggs, then pay attention to the breeds of the chickens you get. Aracaunas are nicknamed the "Easter Egg chicken" for a reason!

(Photo credit: avlxyz on Flickr.com)

Jill Richardson
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