Better Make It A Double

suburban farmers

My MIL told me about this great story she heard on Nightline, and since we don't have a TV, I was able to look it up.
This is just so awesome. A family in Pasadena, of all places, growing all their own food and living richly on peanuts. Seriously, think of the problems we could solve if the average American did even 10% of what they do. I love something that makes me feel inspired to further pursue my already eccentric tendencies. The one question I really wished they'd asked, though, was how they pay for health care. For us, at about $600 (including prescriptions and co-pays) per month, the health care monster rules how we live our lives.

chicks in the city

Our chicken adventures continue, though not exactly unhappily. Since the Unfortunate Incident Involving a Dog and a Chicken, Fanny’s buddy Clara has developed a bad (and painful to our other hens) feather-picking habit. We tried several well-researched things to try and get her to stop, including separating the three hens and letting the feathers grow back, but none worked even a little. Clara’s habit was engrained, and she then taught the same thing to another hen. That left one hen that could be integrated with new chickens, and then we would have had to wait for her to completely re-feather, plus for the other chickens to be the same size as her before integrating them. It seemed like we’d be better off starting over if we ever wanted to get up to 6 hens, and I was tearing my hair out trying to figure out what to do with three good layers that couldn’t live together in this situation. Thankfully, there was a solution: the nice guy who runs the farm & feed store where we got the ladies to begin with was willing to take them in to a couple of his mixed flocks, where such behavior would be better regulated under an established pecking order. I think that it was a decent solution, and I’m very grateful he was willing to do that. He went over all the causes of pecking, and not one fit our situation at all except for the trauma, and since that’s exactly when it started, I’m pretty confident it won’t happen again. The odds are against it, in any case. We’ve learned a lot over the last year, and we’d certainly do some things differently if we had to do it all over again, but we’re very happily committed to continuing. It has been a good experience overall: we love the eggs, their daily care is very easy, and we’ve gotten attached to their companionable clucking in the yard. Even our black lab seems to like them (an not for breakfast, thankfully).  With the price of organic eggs at over $4 a dozen, the savings don’t hurt either. Soooo, we drove back up to the feed & farm store in the pouring rain, said goodbye to Clara, Susan, and Marcy, and got six chicks!

They're a week old. Here they are doing synchronized waddling and peeping:

 

Aren't they cute? They're on top of our piano for the next couple of weeks, then they'll go out to the hen house in the garage along with the heat lamp.

You can probably guess who is most excited. The boys awake in their rooms until after 9 PM last night, they were so wound up. O named the "chipmunk one" you see here "Queenie". N had already decided to name two of them "Sukie and Polly" after the girls in the folk song. I named the rest Coco, Winnie, and Mabel. We continue to walk squarely down the fine line between pet and livestock, but naming them is just too much fun to resist. We got two of the same breeds we'd had, and a few new ones.

Mabel: Blue Cochin

Winnie: White Cochin

These are the gentle giants of the chicken world; big and mellow and sweet.

Coco: Cuckoo Maran (looks very similar to a barred rock like we had, but lays chocolate-colored eggs)

We did some work last week to make the run a little bigger and make both the run and dog kennel a little more attractive.

It feels so strange to go back there and not hear the ladies crooning at me, and even stranger to throw perfectly good food scraps into the garbage. Very inconvenient, this no chicken thing...The peeping from the top of the piano kind of makes up for it, though. The only thing that kind of sucks is that we won't have any more eggs till October at the earliest, but after that, we should hopefully be good for a few years. Now we have to hope that none of our ladies turn out to be gents - not a sure bet for at least another month or so.

tiny farm

Why is it that there are about 2 minutes between waiting, waiting, waiting anxiously for a bit of sun, for warm breezes, and swelling of buds, and then everything in the garden needing my attention at once? Not that I’m complaining.

 Last week: yet another snowstorm, several frosty nights, boots and winter coats, trudging through slush and scraping ice from the windshield. This week: butterflies, Creeping Charlie, shorts and sunhats on preschoolers, and worms in the beaks of hens at my feet.

The compost pile needs turning, the garden and kitchen beds need dressing with compost, seedlings need tending and thinning and dividing and hardening off. The garden bed mulch is uncovered, and I’ve already started watering for the season, as the ground is surprisingly dry. It is busy, but it is a wonderful kind of busy, the kind that leaves one bodily tired at night, satisfied from an hour here and there of satisfied puttering. I make my rounds, digging, tending, turning, the clapclapclap of the neighbor kids’ basketball a steady familiar rhythm, the boys and I getting lungs full of musty, gorgeous earthen decay, insistent birdsongs all around us, my whole body leaning finally into a shovel with a couple of willing apprentices by my side.

And willing they are. I am so cautiously grateful for that, as I’m concerned about their someday rejecting the very thing I love so much. I know that a lot of children of gardening enthusiasts grow up to hate the chores and the weeding and the perceived drudgery of helping out with yard work, and I don’t want that to happen. I want it to be joyful, and right now, it really is. If they prefer to play with their trucks and balls instead of helping me dress beds, that’s fine, but at least right now, they love to help with any of it and they also love to talk about it – about vegetables and bugs, and birds. Today, O said, “We have a tiny farm!” This past week, they’ve watered, composted, sifted compost, dressed the raised beds with compost, helped clean out the chicken run and henhouse, and actually accomplished a significant amount of mulching in between rolling off the mulch pile. My only tax has been spending some extra time washing the dirt from behind their ears and washing the stains out of the knees of their pants—a small price indeed. The best part of all is seeing them feel needed, and competent.

 After a three-year hiatus from seed-starting, I’ve pulled out the lights and seed trays and gotten starts going again this year, using mostly past seasons’ seeds. Almost everything germinated well, even the seed that were 5 years old, and the seedlings are looking beautiful. The air in our bedroom is slightly spicy and fecund as I wake to the timer switching on the lights at 7:30 AM, and several times a day, I peek to see what is happening. Aside from keeping on top of what needs dividing, the thinning is by far the hardest part.

I’ve read that the Scotts have a tradition of exchanging the task of thinning rows with a neighbor, because who, in the first days of Spring verily bursting forth after months of waiting, can stand taking a sharp pair of shears and felling half of one’s very own perfectly healthy cotyledons? Brutal.

I haven’t, with all that, had much energy or time for writing, though my head is full, full of words and sentences, internal meter and prose that comes unbidden and isn’t satisfied with ten minutes here and there to jot down a few notes. I am trying to be at peace with this, to remember that I can’t have everything all at once. I keep thinking of all the tiny seed packets that have spent years in the dark damp of my basement, committing respiration, yet dormant, ready and waiting for a chance at fulfillment through the proper proportions of light, and water, and nutrition. My head is full of seeds, large and small, and breathing, dormant, waiting.

processing

Something sad happened at our house recently. I’m still kind of thinking it all through, so I haven’t mentioned it until now. On Sunday, a neighborhood dog broke into our yard and mauled one of our four hens. When I found Fanny, her best buddy Clara was leaning against her in the snow, and Fanny was alive, but her eyes were closed. I think she was in shock. When I examined Fanny, I realized what would have to happen. Fanny was badly hurt and in a lot of pain, so we had to put an end to her life.

I’d thought some of this through before this unfortunate incident happened—predators are everywhere, even in the city, and chickens are vulnerable to everything from raccoons to dogs to hawks. I’d also been encouraged to ask myself: are these pets? Why do we have them here with us? Will they go to the vet like any other pet, or are these more like farm animals? Our primary motivation for having hens was to have healthy eggs, and for the boys to have the experience of helping with the production of our family’s food. I wanted them to understand the cycle of life, to pick fresh eggs out of the nesting box, to see how our scraps can be turned into protein; how their compost can feed our garden, and so on. In a culture where most of us have no idea where the food we eat even came from, I wanted them to grow up exposed to a healthier model than that. I also wanted them to see that the animals we rely on for food can be treated humanely, that we owe them that respect and a chance at a good life. But I also knew that they weren’t going to be pets. It is possible to save a bit of money having your own backyard chickens, but a single vet bill could wipe that out for years. And if a chicken got hurt, it wouldn’t be kinder to wait for a vet to put it down – our hesitation to be merciful by handling that deed ourselves would be a cruelty to that chicken. And what would we do when our hens aged and stopped laying? We can only have 6 hens at a time – would we be willing to have all those spots taken up by hens that didn’t lay anymore?

I eat meat. Not a lot, and most of it from sustainable, humane sources, but I do eat it and I’m not conflicted about that as long as those animals were treated decently (and the vast majority of animals used for meat are not treated decently, not even close). If that is the case, then would it not be consistent to be at peace with allowing our relatively pampered hens to be processed humanely after their productive laying days are over? To me, that made sense. We would treat our hens kindly, even affectionately, feed them the best food available, allow them to roam as much as we are able to let them, and make sure they had an overall good life as long as they produced eggs with some consistency. By deciding they were essentially farm animals and not pets, we were keeping them as part of our food chain by providing food, not just using more of the world’s resources for some new hobby. Having backyard hens was not just another way to consume; it was part of bringing a little of our food source closer to home, where we could control how humanely the animal was treated and what went into its feed. Having thought quite a bit about all this, not to mention reading both “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and Barbara Kingsolver's latest book this past summer,  I was somewhat prepared for the circumstances we dealt with last week. What I wasn’t prepared for was how this experience would connect two halves of a whole.

We had some choices to make. Animal control had been called by the neighbor, and they wanted to know what our plan was for the “body”. We could have had them take her for a fee, or we could process her for the soup pot. Putting an entire large dead chicken into the garbage to attract even more predators was not an option.

Even now I can not completely explain it, but processing her absolutely felt like the right thing to do. If this magnificent bird with the kind eyes, who provided compost and eggs, and ate our slugs and weeds, was not longer with us, would it really be the rational thing to do to then treat her as a pet only after the end of her life – when it didn’t benefit her at all? Did it not make more sense to respect her purpose here with us by making full use of the nourishment she could provide for a family? Wasn’t the only thing holding me back just the disconnection most of us have from the reality that meat comes from live animals? But could I really process a chicken with a name in my city home?

J had done the actual killing, certain that it would make a complete wreck out of this animal lover. He was mistaken, I think, but I love him dearly for it anyway, because, really, what says true love better than a vegetarian who insists upon killing a chicken for his wife's sake?* His job was done, though, the processing part was mine if anyone was going to do it. I decided to go ahead with it.I called my buddy Peat, our local urban chicken expert, and he walked me through what processing a chicken would entail, and then I looked at a few pictures online to get a better idea of what was involved. I let the blood flow into a pan for an hour, and then put her into boiling water for two minutes to loosen the feathers. I painstakingly plucked the feathers, cut off the legs, then removed the scent gland and the organs, and put her into a pan of ice cold water. Somewhere along the process, the sanitized form of a chicken that we all recognize began to emerge – the pink shrink-wrapped chicken we all see lined up in the grocery store refrigerator case. There was a wide and messy gulf in between Fanny the bird with the kind eyes and that bird we see in the grocery store, and I realized that this work was about everything in that in-between, the literal blood and guts we never have to face when we order a chicken sandwich or toss some chicken breasts into our cart at the grocery store.  That gulf was bridged, two halves of a real whole reconnected as I found myself hunched over the sink, plucking and cutting, pulling and washing. There was something sane, even spiritual about the process even as I also grieved the loss of a beautiful animal.

When I reached inside the plucked bird to pull out the insides, a waiting pan beside me in which to transfer the un-needed organs, the first thing I discovered was a bright orange orb by her vent – a large yolk not yet surrounded by albumen and shell. As my arm moved further inside the bird, I discovered yolk after yolk, each a bit smaller than the last, the final one the size of a pearl. I lined them up in a row, fascinated to realize that each egg’s potential had existed within her weeks earlier.

If you’d asked me to imagine what it would be like to discover one of our hens hurt by an animal, and asked me also what would be hardest about that experience, I’m fairly certain I would have said that ending her life would be the hardest part, and that I didn't think I could process a chicken that had a name. I was wrong about both of those assumptions. The hardest part was seeing her buddy Clara huddled beside her in the snow, and seeing Fanny herself hurt and suffering for any time at all.  I felt terrible that I’d let that happen. The killing, though, was a relief, an act of mercy that couldn’t have come soon enough. The boiling and the plucking and all the rest were acts of respect for her life and it’s purpose, a life well and happily lived, and for our ability to provide a good life for any future animal that comes into our care. We will be adding three more pullets this spring, bringing our total to six. We look forward to many more years of tending a clucking backyard flock, of very small-scale animal husbandry, knowing that we can handle whatever comes and learn from the experience as we go.  I won't process a hen again myself unless it's an emergency - mostly out of respect for my neighbors -  but there are other places in town to have that done humanely and inexpensively if we need to.

While too much exposure can desensitize, none also makes it easy to ignore the sources of our food.If anything, this experience has made me more determined to be consistent in avoiding meat that I don’t know anything about. More and more options for non-CAFO meat are available, at least around here. It costs more, but we try to balance that out with some inexpensive beans-and-rice type meals every week. J is still mostly vegetarian, and the boys are starting to eat a little meat here and there when they ask for it. The boys didn’t see any of what happened, and I did the processing when they were thankfully napping, but we did choose to share some information with them. They know our flock well enough to notice Fanny’s absence. We told them that Fanny was hurt, and we had to help her die. They took this in stride, as they have in general when we’ve talked about what “meat” is, but they often say “Fanny died” out of nowhere. This kind of thing might actually be a whole lot harder a couple of years from now. When we go to the grocery store, N or O always point to the chickens and says “those are processed”. I always remind them, in the simplest way I can, that anyone who processes and eats an animal has a responsibility to be kind to that animal first as long as it’s alive. I’ll miss Fanny, but I’m grateful, at least, for the opportunity to be more connected to the reality of where my food comes from, and that we're making some choices to make that a reality we can live with.

(Fanny was the buff hen on the left) 

 

*This is an edit/addition - I somehow (and accidentally) left this paragraph out when I posted yesterday.

 

closer to home

I spent the early evening sitting in a lawn chair, peeling carrots into a colander in my lap, and watching my boys run around the backyard in their underwear, using every bit of their little-boy-sized muster to keep from chasing the four hens we keep back there. I love that. I love what taking care of these birds is teaching them, the practiced self-control needed to make friends with a chicken, for example. I love that the first thing our boys do every morning is go to the coop with their daddy, let the chickens out of the hen house and feed them scratch. Taking care of the “ladies” is the first thing they have done to be a contributing member of the household. They see it as their job – N tells me that if the chickens don’t have scratch, they will be sad. They know exactly where eggs come from, and peer eagerly into the part of the hen house the ladies do their laying. "Issa Marcy egg!", says O when he eats his scrambled eggs. Talking about eggs has led to conversations about where milk comes from, what farmers do, what the rain is for, and what compost is all about. My boys are firmly on the side of the ladybugs –those voracious eaters of “baaaad aphids”. We have a little bit of a closed loop in our backyard – us growing food, the chickens eating the extra and much that is not fit for composting, turning it into a source of protein, their waste then fertilizing the garden beds, so that we can grow the food, and so on. Of course we still bring much of our food in from other sources, but even that has become closer to home this summer than ever before.

In July, I finished reading “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle”, Barbara Kingsolver’s inspiring read about a year spent growing most of her and her family’s own food. In true Kingsolver style, she and her family weave their own experiences with stories of small farmers, a copious amount of statistics and information, travel stories, and even recipes. The result is a beautiful book that has changed the way I look at our little postage stamp of a lot, and also had an effect on what I pay attention to at the co-op, seeing my vegetable and fruit options through the lens of farmers and their proximity to our location. It is a gift – to have the opportunity to support a local economy I have an investment in, to reduce the amount of fossil fuels my family takes from our planet, to even meet the people who grow my food and share in the risks they take. In exchange, those farmers grow us healthy, truly nutritious food that preserve heirloom strains that don’t usually don't ship well but taste exquisite.

We haven’t done a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) share for awhile, mostly because we grow quite a bit of the same stuff right here in our yard. Next year, though, I might plan my garden based mostly on what I can put up and freeze, and get most of the produce we eat from a CSA. Our state has been hit by a double whammy of severe drought and flooding this year, and our local co-ops are doing their best to help share the risk farmers take every year and ease their burdens by buying up the produce that has been salvaged and raising funds. Several CSA farms were hard hit by the recent floods, and I don’t know that all of them will survive.*

Even without a weekly CSA box, buying local isn’t as hard as I thought it was, especially since we are already co-op shoppers. What I didn’t really understand before I read the book, though, is that vegetables that are in season at the same time just go together. How good does a “fresh” tomato that was bred to be able to sit in a truck for a week really ever taste in November compared to say, a squash soup, or a root salad, or tomato sauce or pesto from the freezer that was made with quality vegetables? Why do I need an apple from New Zealand in July when local blueberries and plums are abundant? It makes so much sense to pay attention to where my food comes from, yet I spent so little time thinking about it before now. Part of the reason is the year-round display of colorful but often tasteless fruits and veggies that adorn our supermarkets.  Did you know that tomatoes are now being bred to be more “square” so that they ship more efficiently? Is it any surprise that vegetables and fruits are far less nutritious than they used to be when they are bred for the primary purpose of sitting in a box?

We just joined a co-op that allows us to order natural foods online from local sources and pick it up at a church monthly. This week’s box contained eggs from the Amish, a box of mixed veggies picked that morning, local honey, soap and maple syrup. The labels aren't fancy, and most of it is probably produces by very small operations, but the food is delicious. Meat and grains are also available, and I plan to order monthly from now on.

Now that my back feels so much better, look out. I already have plans to add raised beds in the area where we’re losing a tree, because even with a replacement tree there, we should have years of sunlight before it’s too shady to plant. I can just see my 4 x 5 plot of basil for pesto now...

As my boys finished following the ladies around and started begging for supper, I carried the carrot peelings to the coop using my skirt as an apron. The hens came running as the orange bits were scattered on the dirt floor. Closing the coop door behind them, we wished the ladies a good evening and headed into the house to eat. As we began to make our way up the back steps, N stopped. He said, “I want to go through to the front door so we can eat cherry tomatoes!” I am not one to keep a boy from his tomatoes, so we headed back out for an appetizer as the sun shone bright and low through the trees.

Want to find out what’s local to you? If you live in the US, go here and put in your zip code. I wish you many grand adventures in local eating.

*See Carrie’s beautiful post on what her CSA has had to deal with this year.

and Marcy laid an egg

Well, with all that seriousness lately, I thought I'd give an update on our chickens.

We have eggs! Small eggs, but the real thing. The eggs will get bigger as the chickens get older.

We found one in the next box yesterday, and then today, we found three more, so I think maybe two or three of the girls are laying now.

Marcy has been quite agitated lately, but she's been cool as a cucumber the last couple of days, so she must be please with herself.

All the ladies are doing well and they've grown a lot.

They spend a couple of hours or so a day hanging out in our fenced backyard. So far, nobody has tried to escape. Why would they, when they have such a lovely coop?

They often hang out under the spirea bushes, taking dust baths. I've not seen a slug this year that wasn't in a chicken's mouth.

This garden bed is fallow this year, as it was used pretty heavily for four years straight, and the chickens are doing a nice job of fertilizing it. I also take their bedding and spread it there when I clean the coop, tilling it in a little. This bed should be in great shape come spring, and perhaps by then, the boys will have enough self-control not to eat everything they have access to. The care an feeding take less than an hour a week, and we've had enough compost to give them that they don't need a whole lot of feed. Taking care of chickens is quite simple and easy compared to a dog, or even a cat. The litter sure doesn't smell as bad.

Every morning, the boys go out to the co*op with J before breakfast, usually in their underwear and pajama tops. If my SIL hasn't let them out yet, they open the door to the coop, and the boys give any extras like leftover salad or cereal to the hens. The also throw them some scratch grain to keep them busy and happy. The boys love it, crooning sweetly to them, "Good morning, girls! Here's some scratch!" If we're out and about for a long time, No*ah says we have to go home, because the chickens are lonely.

We still plan on getting a couple more hens next summer or spring, but for now, we're very satisfied taking care of our four hens.

the ladies are here!

They're here! The coop is finished (thanks mostly to J's Dad and a whole lot of reusable stuff we found in the rafters of our garage), and we are the proud owners of 4 pullets (young hens).

This is our henhouse. It wasn't quite finished in this picture. It sits in the garage, and has an old kitchen cabinet mounted on each side for a nesting box. The whole bottom is accessible, making it very easy to clean. It is pretty funny to sit in the garage and hear the hens clucking as the boys play on their train table. We did that this evening, and every few minutes, both boys would run over and look at the the hens and say "Hello, ladies!"

This is the inside. The box you see there is the framed opening to the outside run. The big red hen, one of the four we picked up on Sunday, had some possibly serious issues with her feet, so we actually brought her back and exchanged her for a different bird today.

This is the run. It is made from a dog kennel. The birds are learning to get in and out, and are doing a pretty good job of it so far. Next summer, we'd like to add a couple of panels to the run to expand it and raise a couple of chicks. We'll probably put a nicer roof on it then too, and enclose it in lattice so we don't have to look at the kennel walls. We'll leave a cutout for viewing, though, because watching them is a lot of fun.

This is Marcy. She is a Silver-Laced Wyandotte we picked up today to replace the red hen. Marcy is our oldest bird at 17 weeks, and she could lay as soon as a few weeks from now.

This is Fanny, our Buff Orpington. She's a sweet, docile bird who is probably going to be on the bottom of the pecking order. These birds are slow to mature, but lay well in cold weather, and Fanny will probably be our biggest bird at about 10 pounds.

That leaves Clara (in front, a Barred Plymouth Rock), and Susan (in the back). Susan is an Ameracauna. These are also sometimes called "Easter Eggers" because these hens lay green or blue tinted eggs. Susan loves to sit on the high branch, and would have flown right out of the coop had there not been a tarp. I'm thinking we'll clip both her wings instead of just one. Clara is very friendly and tame. This morning she sat on my foot and ate right out of my hand. She and Fanny were hatched at the same time and were in the same pen. They're the youngest, at almost 11 weeks old, so it will be a while before they lay.

The boys are very excited! "Soooo cute!", they say. N is a little more cautious so far, but very interested.

O has no hesitation in petting a hen. He's Mr. Fearless in everything these days, it seems. He slides down the slide at the playground, then stands up and jumps straight off the end.

Taking care of the Ladies has been pretty simple so far. Every morning, I need to replace the water and add a scoop of feed as I let the Ladies into the run. Every evening, they go back into the hen house and I latch the door. Once or twice a week, depending on how much rain we've had, I will replace the straw and make sure the coop is clean. They get compost scraps, scratch, and grit in addition to their feed. It's no harder than taking care of a cat or parakeet, and we'll soon have our own fresh eggs, laid about 25 feet from the stove they'll be cooked on.

Tonight after the boys went to bed, I made a summer potato salad with green beans and walnuts, and my SIL(and upstairs roommate) and J and I sat in lawn chairs next to the coop, watching the Ladies do their thing and listening to their companionable clucking. I think we're going to like having a backyard flock.

Oh, and a picture of all the favorite big and little men in my life:

We're expecting!

NO, not another baby, at least not a human baby. We're expecting hens! We just put in a permit application (which needed to be signed by our neighbors) to have 6 backyard chickens. There are a few hundred other families in this city that also have chickens, so we’re not all that unusual for doing this, but we do have to follow the rules.

Why would we do such a thing in the middle of a large city? Well, there are several reasons.

• I grew up seeing my grandma’s pet chickens when I lived in the

  Netherlands

  as a young child. I really enjoyed helping take care of them and eating their eggs. We think N and O will enjoy it too. Helping take care of chickens helped me feel competant, which was a gift.
• Even the best organic farm can’t afford to feed their chickens as well as an individual can on good starter and kitchen scraps. Eggs from home-raised chickens just taste better. They have beautiful orange yolks and are much more flavorful.
• Chickens eat insects, such as ticks and mosquitoes.
• Chickens are pretty easy to care for, and not smelly if the coop is kept clean. We just visited a flock of 30+ chickens with a clean coop and there was no real smell at all.
• Compost for the garden! We have 4 raised vegetable beds that need lots of compost every year.
• Not counting startup costs, it costs about 50 cents a dozen to raise your own backyard organic eggs, about a 2-dollar savings on every dozen. We think we’ll break even in about a year, since we are starting with chicks. This isn’t our primary motivation, but it doesn’t hurt.
• Full-grown young chickens lay 5-7 eggs a week. If we have 6 hens, that’ll be about 35 eggs a week, hopefully enough to share some with family and neighbors.
• Did you know that (in the US) most of the food you get from the grocery store travels an average of over a thousand miles to get to you? We want to bring our food sources a little closer to home, so that not all our food has to use a bunch of fossil fuels to get to us. We also have a vegetable garden, shop at farmer’s markets and try to buy locally at co-ops, and this is just one more way to add to the habit.
• In some urban neighborhoods, chickens have become a fun way for neighbors and their kids to get to know each other. We’d like to welcome neighbors and their kids by to see our chickens and feed them scraps. The boys have lots of little buddies these days, and it’ll be a nice thing to share with them. We might even have their Sunday School class over sometime.

Here’s what we are doing in particular:

• We will NOT be keeping a rooster. Hens aren’t very noisy, but roosters can be a nuisance and aren’t needed for egg production.
• The housing setup for the hens will consist of an outdoor “run” and a “hen house” (where the chickens lay eggs and roost at night) inside the garage. (A coop = a run and a hen house)
• Our “run” will be an enclosed 10x10 dog kennel attached to our garage. The kennel will be within our fenced yard, proving extra protection from possible predators. We are lucky enough to have some granite counter “seconds” in our garage that will make a perfect “concrete floor” when placed upside down on the ground. This will make the run easy to clean thoroughly with a hose. Eventually, we will surround the run with lattice to make it more attractive. You can see the waiting kennel panels below, and that's the garage wall the opening will go into. We'll need to build a roof as well.

• Our “hen house” will be inside the garage, and accessible from the run through a framed opening from inside the kennel/run. This will make it easy to feed and water the chickens in the winter without standing outside in the cold. The opening will be lockable, and the chickens will be locked up at night. In winter, the hen house will be surrounded by straw bales for insulation.
• We will probably be getting pullots (hens less than a year old).
• Our hens will not be allowed out of the coop unsupervised. They may walk (supervised) in our fenced backyard for a short time on occasion while we clean the coop, and in winter, we plan to allow them some time to stretch their legs in the garage when it’s too cold for them to go into the run for long. Chickens are not great flyers (most can get about 3 feet high), and we will be getting standard, non-flying breeds and clipping a few feathers if necessary to be on the safe side.

We recently took a field trip to visit a flock of chickens and do a little research.

After about a minute of terror, the boys had great fun feeding the chickens the arugala and spinach scraps we brought them. The boys also enjoyed walking in the wild part of the island.

Can you believe that this beauty exists just across the river from downtown? I love this city.

Now that we have to signatures we need, we can get started. We need to put up a section of privacy fence for the neighbors, attach the kennel to the garage, put down the granite floor, make an opening into the garage, build the hen house (out of scrap wood), and then put everything together before making a field trip to the Farm Store to get supplies and a few hens, hopefully by the end of June. My FIL is graciously helping us, and he and my MIL will get first dibs on extra eggs.

Wish us luck!