Chocolate hangover anyone?

The Easter festivities are over but you may still have a few half-eaten chocolate eggs sitting around the house and a guilty sense that you overdid it a little. 

While Easter is an important religious holiday in the Christian calendar, when most people think Easter they think four-day-weekend, a big white bunny and a whole lot of chocolate. 
I don't want to bag chocolate, it's wonderful stuff, but all the packaging involved with the Easter cheer is enough to make any environmentally conscious individual give a little shudder. (Not too mention the embedded carbon in all that milk and sugar!)

While it's a little late for us to suggest alternative gifts for Easter 2010 here is an idea for all year round and a good one to keep in mind for next Easter... Rent or buy some chooks and get some real eggs rather than the chocolate imitations.   

Chooks are amazing waste management, food producing powerhouses.

backyard chooks

They eat food scraps, control pests like cockroaches and spiders, provide a natural fertilizer and give you lovely, fresh, zero food mile eggs. How awesome is that! 

And they're not just for the country, chooks are a great option for suburbia too.


If you're interested in buying chooks and live in the Sydney area you should check out Rentachook.com.au. Rentachook offers a try-before-you-buy option so that you can give keeping chooks a go before you make a solid commitment tp your furry friends.

For inspiration have a look at Heidi McElnea's great experiment in keeping Japanese Quails mini chooks. 

Photo by Flickr user dcmaster. Used under Creative Commons license.