Jill Richardson: I Took a Chicken to the Doctor

I've broken the beauty of chickens down into their component parts but as you can see it's a cycle. Chickens take unwanted things from my home and yard and turn them into valuable products - eggs, fertilizer, and meat. Or in my case, eggs, fertilizer, and cute fun pets that I will never eat.

Can you garden without chickens? Yeah. But as I've found over the past year, it kinda sucks. I started gardening with totally dead soil. We compost. We have a worm bin. And our family of four produces entirely too little compost to feed our soil.