Life on the
PASTA FARM
You read that right, we have a farm! For Pasta! Meet our flock, making beautiful eggs that we use to make our delicious pastas!
A girl from suburban New Jersey studies Italian cooking in Italy, becomes a pasta-maker, lands on Martha’s Vineyard island with two little girls and she starts… a chicken farm? That’s a pretty wild story, but here’s how it happened.
Hazel, my oldest daughter, learned about the life cycle of chickens in her Montessori preschool class. They had a classroom incubator with a dozen fertilized eggs and they watched closely each day waiting for the tiny chicks to break out of their shells. They diligently colored in one egg per day on their “Egg to Chick” coloring page as they waited and watched. Each day leading up to hatch day held more and more excitement as the toddlers eagerly awaited meeting their new feathered friends. When it finally happened, I too was filled to the brim with joy! The kids watched the newborn chicks gingerly find their footing and start to explore their new life outside the egg. But after about a week, the teachers were ready to find the chicks a new home. Though we had never raised any farm animals before, Hazel and I (and baby Joy) decided we were up to the grand task of figuring out how to keep chickens.
We had A LOT to learn but through research and conversations with other chicken enthusiasts and local community farmers, we started to get the hang of it. Our Montessori chickens, Morning, Night, and Present, quickly became part of our little family. We clap and say thank you whenever they lay eggs. Joy plays tag with them in the yard. We compost our kitchen scraps to give them yummy treats. We have continued to grow our flock and now have 2 dozen little layers on our land in West Tisbury. We continue to read about chicken farming, attend chicken wellness courses at local teaching farms, and learn from all the super-experienced farmers around us in an effort to make a real go of this tiny Pasta Farm.
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