The Chicken Question at El jardin de los Sueños, Ecuador

In many areas it is not just easier but also ecological beneficial to provide your own food. Therefore, we already have our own fruit zone and a vegetable garden. Not to forget the tons of bananas growing around us. We use them for nearly everything: cooking, baking, juices, jams or as a tasty snack in between. Additionally, they allow us to attract and observe butterflies and birds. We keep a record of the species we see and can thereby monitor changes. But even in a beautiful nature with very tasty fruits, just eating fruits and vegetables gets boring and unhealthy. We need to buy groceries like flour, rice, pasta and animal products like milk or eggs. When we rent one of our ecolodges to scientists or tourists, we sometimes serve fish from our pond or a chicken, which has been bought before. To provide ourselves with two more groceries we would like to hold our own chicken. This would not just mean a consistent and more important close supply of eggs. From time to time we could have our own, guaranteed organic chicken, which had a happy life before. This is not only cheaper and more environmental-friendly in a long-term view, but also an improvement regarding the quality of the meat. Organic quality is just not available here. Holding chicken would help us a lot in our daily life and avoids driving to buy eggs and meat.

Living in a cloud forest does not make things easier. The surrounding nature offers a habitat to more than just birds and butterflies. Hunters like the Ocelot or the Tyra live here, as well. The former has no objection to a big bird as a midnight snack and the second one even kills chicken during the day. Therefore, all the chicken we had got victims of predators. This means for us, that we must protect the new ones we intend to buy. As our so called “garden of dreams“ is meant to preserve and protect nature, we do not want to lay out poisonous baits, as it is common in this area. Our solution is to keep predators off – by a secure FENCE. Unfortunately, secure fences are difficult to build and expensive. All in all we will need materials worth 1400 USD.

Therefor we need your Help. Please donate for our chicken project so we can have happy chicken and their eggs in our “garden of the dreams”. Thank you very much.

www.jardin-de-los-suenos.com