Penny Broughton writes books for families who learn by doing.

It started with chickens. The garden came after — small at first, mostly to use what the birds gave back — and the ducks after that. She keeps all of it on a suburban lot in the California East Bay, zone 9b, with a husband and two kids who ask questions faster than any one answer can hold. By day she works in a pathology lab, which is probably why the books came out the way they did: she has trouble leaving a fact unchecked.

She writes for two readers — the grown-up and the child beside them. In Seeds & Soil, the first volume of Our Working Home, they get a page each, facing, across all forty-seven topics. In Pearl Before Swine, a girl told to shoo the hens puts boots on every last one of them. In Neil the Veal, a bottle-fed calf is sold away, and walks a very long way back to the only boy who ever fed him.

She is at work on Feather & Flock, the second volume of Our Working Home, on the chickens and ducks that started the whole thing — along with more children’s books, which keep arriving faster than she can finish them.

When she isn’t writing or illustrating she’s at the knitting machine, mostly before the alarm goes off.