If the Easter Bunny forgot to leave you eggs this morning, maybe you should consider outsourcing the rabbit’s job next year. After all, it’s a big job – like Santa, he’s got the whole world to cover in one night.
The eco-eggs coloring and grass-growing kit, from the company eco-kids, is made in Portland, in a 3,000-square-foot facility on Presumpscot Street. Use the eggs from the farmers market or your own chickens, and dye them with eco-eggs’ organic fruit, plant and vegetable extracts.
The curcumin extract turns eggs yellow, and the purple sweet potato dyes them magenta, says Kip Weeks, who founded eco-kids with his wife, Cammie, in 2008. Red cabbage, counter-intuitively, turns eggs blue.
The annatto seed extract turns eggs orange and though it’s non-toxic, it is so potent it will stain. “If you’re not careful,” Weeks said, “you’ll look like an oompa-loompa by the end of the day if you’re working with it. Or a Donald Trump.”
Fruits and vegetables have long been used to dye Easter eggs. It’s a lot of fun to do at home, as we discovered a few years ago, but it’s also some work making the dyes. With eco-eggs, for $9.99 you not only get the dyes (in powder form), you also get a grass-growing kit so you don’t have to resort to that green cellophane stuff they sell at drug stores. (Weeks says he has managed to keep his grass growing for a month after Easter.) A crayon is also included for writing clever things on your eggs before dying them.
The company eco-kids sold out of eco-eggs a couple of weeks before Easter this year, but retailers had plenty, including Treehouse Toys, Whole Foods and Bella Luna. So maybe it’s time to give the Easter bunny his notice.
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