We often get asked why we have a chicken on our logo – after all what does cider have to do with chickens of any type or colour? When Teresa, our graphic designer presented me with the various options for our logo back in 2015 my initial reaction was the same. However the chicken idea kind of grew on us and he made us smile so in the end we went for it. When I think back though maybe Teresa knew us better than we knew ourselves because really this whole cidery plan maybe wouldn’t have happened without some chickens to kick it all off.
We moved to Langley in 2003 and really enjoyed having a bigger back yard after our townhome in Coquitlam. At first it was enough just to have a decent herbaceous border and a couple of tomato plants. Before long though I started to thirst for bigger horticultural goals. It started out innocently enough with a couple of raised veggie beds but soon the whole self-sufficiency thing started to grab my imagination and I decided chickens were the next big thing. Not sure where to start I enrolled my two unsuspecting kids in the Chicken 4H club. Living vicariously through their membership, I obtained some heritage breed eggs which we proceeded to hatch in a home incubator. Our initial flock consisted of 6 chickens, 4 of which turned out to be rather aggressive neighbour-annoying roosters (which were speedily re-homed). The other 2 chickens were beautiful glossy black amerucanas which lay lovely aqua blue eggs. Snips and Charles (the chickens were named before they were accurately sexed) have been the mainstay of our flock over the past few years, maintaining top status in the pecking order through various generations of additional birds. Charles was the victim of a coyote attack this spring (a sad day) but Snips is still going strong and at 9 years old is still contributing her blue eggs to the daily haul from the nesting boxes. She is a friendly soul, very much a people-chicken and always up for a chat and a stroke – when she was a hatchling I would often enter the living room to see her sat on a towel on my son’s lap watching TV with him and she often came out for car rides in the back seat.
We enjoyed the chickens so much (although we did get a little sick of omelettes for dinner) that we then got beehives and I then started a mini fruit tree orchard, which grew into an idea to make our own cider, which grew into an idea to start a cidery, which in turn translated into a 12 acre farm with 1500 trees and counting.
So in the end maybe its a fitting reminder of the origin of this project to have a chicken on our logo – it just shows, follow your passions – you have no idea where they might take you!
“Snips” Our senior chicken