By Melanee Meegan, Peace Coffee Marketing Manager

There are now two Yetis in my life that I love dearly. My first love affair with the Yeti began three years ago when our roasting team created a coffee exclusively for making iced coffee. This incredibly smooth, rich and chocolaty coffee concentrate can be added to smoothies, mixed with vodka, and even made into a highly caffeinated popsicle. This special blend needed a name that captured the pleasantness of its taste and also implied that it was best served chilled.  I had recently read about a yeti footprint discovery on Mount Everest and I thought that the mysterious and seemingly mild-mannered persona of a Yeti captured the essence of this new coffee blend. Some of the Peace Coffee crew had hesitations about the name, but luckily for me the name has grown on them and the Yeti has actually become a mascot of sorts at work. (A miniature fair trade yeti ornament is almost always stuffed in people's travel luggage and appears in many photos from around the world including a recent trip back to her homeland in Nepal! To see photos from Yeti’s travels go to fairtradeyeti.com.)

Now enters Yeti, the rooster, into my life. No, I didn’t name this one Yeti; he came to me with that name already. This Yeti is a beautiful, large, fluffy, and loud-mouthed, white-feathered Japanese silky rooster (the picture of him says it all). Yeti and a hen named Kandinsy (the egg layer) are living in my backyard. The two chickens were acquired through the Chicken Run Rescue. This organization takes chickens that have been neglected, abused, abandoned or intended for fighting. Some are also the discarded outcome of "nature lessons" for children or after a hobby that no longer holds interest.

My household didn’t have any pets before the chickens arrived but for the most part the chickens haven’t drastically changed things for us. They are very low maintenance and easy to care for (and love!). They sleep in the basement of the house at night, to protect them from raccoons. They can eat most vegetable food scraps except for avocados and potato skins. Yeti crows each morning as the sun rises and the birds begin to chirp. Since I am an early riser I don’t mind the rooster alarm clock and thankfully my neighbors don’t either. In fact the chickens have become the talk of the block. Some of the older neighbors told me that seeing the chickens roaming around my backyard reminds them of their childhood growing up on a farm. Some of the younger kids that come through the alley to spy on the chickens are, at first, apprehensive and nervous as I invite them to meet the chickens. Their timidity quickly turns into excitement when they realize that the chickens are just friendly and silly looking animals that like to peck at grapes from your hand and will fall asleep in your arms while you are holding them.

More and more people like me are bringing a piece of the farm into the city. There is plenty of space for chickens, beehives (now legal in Minneapolis), vegetable gardens, and even goats (legal in St. Paul) to coexist amongst us city folks. It doesn’t mean that it will be a perfect harmony. The dog next door might attack my chickens, the squirrels and rabbits frequently feast in my vegetable garden but these are minor annoyances outweighed by the joy of hunting for fresh eggs in my backyard with neighborhood kids and eating hand picked arugula and spinach salads for dinner. This summer I hope that everyone can be as content as I am sitting outside, drinking a tall glass of yeti cold press and watching the rooster Yeti and his sidekick Kandinsky happily wandering, pecking and clucking in my backyard.

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