Cradling a still-warm egg in the palm of your hand causes the world to slow, giving you a moment to stop and breathe. In that moment the background hum of traffic is absent, the anxiety of the morning rush no longer exists -- and the lovely girl who left the natural treasure coos at your feet, expecting a few kernels of maize.
This is my morning exchange. I am addicted.
By Christmas Day we had 9 lovely chicks.
Keepers of backyard chooks know of this simple pleasure. But you do not even need a "backyard" to have chooks. A few square metres of courtyard is sufficient if you have the right girls.
I know this because I have spent eight years developing the perfect chook for small yards.
I discovered the secret pleasure of keeping chooks quite by accident while I was completing a Master of Sustainability. What started out as a short project studying the calorie intake and egg output of different chicken breeds turned into an obsession. Now my family and I could never live without them in our garden.
Over the next few weeks I will tell you all about the flocks I have created, the attributes that make them so special and why they are suited to small yards.
By the time my Christmas Day hatch are laying (n about 18 weeks time)you'll wonder how your family ever got by without chooks.
