"It seems like you spend so much time worrying over the incubator, you would have been better off ordering chicks through the mail," my father said after I wrote about my chick-hatching rollercoaster.

In the short term, he was right.  Raising our own chicks isn't worth all the sleepless nights and emotional highs and lows.  On the other hand, by hatch three, the only reason I woke up in the night is because four chicks were hatching very loudly three feet away from my pillow at 2 am.

I like to peruse our blog archives and am always amused to read about how tough various tasks were the first few times we did them.  Killing chickens and extracting honey were initially traumatic, but now an evening of chicken-plucking is restful, and I didn't think twice about snagging a couple of quarts of honey from the hive last week.  Ditto with waiting for chicks to poke their way out of the shell or even deciding that a troubled chick needs to be helped or euthanized.  In the end, self-sufficiency and "job" satisfaction are worth being sent for a loop the first few times I try a new skill.

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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