One of my favorite non-fiction books is Barbara Kingsolver’s  Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. She is a beautiful writer.  I was mesmerized as she journeyed through a year of eating locally. It’s something I fantasize about trying.  However, since I have zero gardening skills, I don’t think I would be as successful as she was eating only foods grown myself or purchased from local farmers. Other than tomatoes and the occasional herb, I have limited knowledge on how I would actually feed myself.

I did consider jumping into the backyard chicken trend when we first moved back to Maine but then I remembered that we own a lab. My understanding is labs and chickens don’t always play nicely. It’s the whole retriever thing. While I might have been able to train my dog to “leave it” when it came to the chickens, overall it seemed too stressful especially for a novice chicken wrangler like me.

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