A student can drive to the grocery store across town, search with little luck for a parking space, run inside the store and comb the aisles to find the right jar of honey. Families with beehives simply walk outside to find honey.

Sophomore Luke Eidam has had three beehives for seven years. The Eidams harvest honey every three months and depending on the season, can collect up to four gallons.

“When we were younger and cuter, we could sell it on the corner of our street to people driving by,” Eidam said.

Now they gift the honey to friends and neighbors.

“Ever since we started, a lot of my dad’s friends have started because the honey is better and you get more of it,” he said.

Junior Maggie White and her family likewise chose urban farming over the supermarket experience.

“We have chickens and bees and a big garden of fruits and vegetables,” White said. “It gives us fantastic, fresh foods that we know exactly how they were grown and where they come from.”

For those without the option of urban farming, there are other ways to control what goes into their food.

“I can definitely see how hard it is for our food to be created,” freshman Will Reicher said after taking a class on bread making. “I think we should appreciate more where our food comes from and how it is made.”

Even teachers enjoy the benefits of home farming and handmade foods. English teacher Mercedes Foster has been raising four chickens in her backyard for two and a half years.

“They’re like pets at my house. They come when you call them, let us pet them and they give us eggs,” Foster said.

In the summer, she can collect up to 18 eggs per week and ten per week in the winter. The chickens are not only useful for laying eggs, they also eat the weeds and bugs in Foster’s yard.

Foster began keeping chickens about two years after English teacher Jody Weverka arrived at meetings with stories about her three chickens.

“Everybody who gets them loves them and they’re really not like other eggs that you get,” Weverka said.

Although Weverka said hens usually stop laying eggs at about three years old, she currently has one four-year-old black chicken that continues to lay eggs.

“The yolks are almost orange, they’re so deeply, richly yellow,” Weverka said. “Its almost all yolk and almost no white. They’re really good for cooking for that reason.”

In addition to raising chickens, Weverka and her husband enjoy making cheese, yogurt, beef jerky and dried cherries.

“Food is one of the joys of life, so why not have a little fun with it and try something new,”    Weverka said.