Keep Chickens!: Tending Small Flocks in Cities, Suburbs, and Other Small Spaces
160
Keep Chickens!: Tending Small Flocks in Cities, Suburbs, and Other Small Spaces
160eBook
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Overview
No matter how small your lot is, you can keep chickens and enjoy fresh eggs every morning. Barbara Kilarski shares her passion for poultry as she fills this guide with tips and techniques for successfully raising chickens in small spaces. Spotlighting the self-sufficient pleasures of tending your own flock, Kilarski offers detailed information on everything from choosing breeds that thrive in tight quarters and building coops to providing medical care for sick animals. You’ll have fun as you keep happy and productive chickens.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781603422017 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Storey Publishing, LLC |
| Publication date: | 02/27/2015 |
| Sold by: | Hachette Digital, Inc. |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 160 |
| File size: | 12 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
From City Chick to Urban Chickens
Chickens in San Francisco, Boston, and Seattle? Why not? Chickens in the suburbs and bedroom communities of Saint Louis, San Diego, and Chicago? Most certainly. Keeping enough hens to provide a family with fresh eggs every day is not a new idea. But it is a novel idea in this day and time, riding on the wake of a growing trend toward increased quality of life and greater control over the little things in life — like the eggs we eat.
At any given moment, there are 10 billion chickens clucking around the world. Hens worldwide lay close to 700 billion eggs each year. Most chickens live on large commercial farms. A few live on small farms or rural homesteads. Fewer still live in cities, suburbs, and towns. But this is changing, in my own neighborhood and in neighborhoods across America, as more and more people are keeping small flocks of chickens tucked away in their city and town yards and gardens.
My decision to keep chickens — hens, actually — for eggs and amusement in my tiny Portland, Oregon, yard began with childhood reminiscences that inspired a landscaping project that evolved into a personal philosophy of self-reliance and sustenance and more control over the source of my fresh foods. All because of chickens? Sounds crazy, I know. But I've never felt saner. Those ubiquitous yet taken-for-granted chickens have changed my life, and I love them for it.
That's right, I love my chickens! They are a part of my family just like any other loved and loving pet. Those of you who are not yet thrilled by the idea of chickens in your backyard deserve an explanation.
If ever there was an unlikely person to enjoy the company of chickens, it's me. My exposure to chickens as I was growing up was minimal. Ironic, considering that my father grew up the son of a butcher on a farm in Poland, and my mother was raised on a farm in France. Despite my pro-chicken gene pool, I grew up instead to be a Total City Chick.
I was born and raised in Los Angeles, where "chicken" was the derogatory name for boys who wouldn't fight in the schoolyard. In the "planned unit developments" where my family lived, I rarely saw live chickens, except at petting zoos and (for brief moments) at Chinatown meat markets. The only other time I saw chickens in any other state of being was at the dinner table, trussed, stuffed, and crusted golden brown. I never thought about chickens much unless deciding how I wanted mine cooked — fried, barbecued, sautéed, broiled, braised, stewed, or baked. Given chickens' relentless versatility as a main course, years later I shouldn't have been surprised that this selfless, utilitarian bird would be so adaptable to living in my modest urban backyard.
Now I live in Portland, the biggest city in Oregon. Here, "chicken" means chicken, the feathered bird of barnyard lore. My neighborhood is the dense, busy southeast quadrant known to locals as "the Southeast." Despite appearances — the houses tend to have broad front porches and long driveways — homes here are "cozy" (that is, small and very close to neighbors' windows). The yards are also cozy, having as many as five adjacent backyards. Gardeners need creativity and verdant screens to make these cramped spaces seem private and bountiful.
A stroll down most streets in Portland provides plenty of evidence that gardening is seriously embraced as a community-wide pastime. Front yards of the Southeast bungalows are lush, loved, and crammed full of broadleaf rhododendrons, bamboo, and flowering bulbs like daffodils, tulips, lilies, and dahlias. Folks make the most of their tiny city yards.
I was bit by the gardening bug when I bought my house. The 1908 Craftsman bungalow is big on old-fashioned charm and detail and small on yard space. Original features include an entry hall with leaded glass windows, doors and ceilings framed in wide, ornate moldings, and doorknobs made of glass, brass, and porcelain. The curb outside features half-dollar-sized iron rings to which inhabitants and visitors to this house tied their horses nearly a hundred years ago. In exchange for all the historic structural detailing, I had to give up yard space: My home has a very small lot, not wide enough for a driveway. Nonetheless, it was and is my land. There is nothing so grounding, so "American Dreamish," as buying a home and doing what you want with it. I felt a greater connection to the land and the structure than I'd ever felt as a lifetime renter, and more home-oriented hobbies than I had imagined could exist began to interest me.
Shortly after settling in to my modest bungalow with the postage-stamp–size yard, I got to work. Like my neighbors, I've had to landscape efficiently. I've managed to cram in raised flower beds, a fern bog, a grass hill, a berry patch, and various trees, shrubs, bamboo, and bulbs. I installed two concrete patios (one covered), two winding stone paths, a birdbath, and a bucket pond with koi and water plants. Once I got started in the garden, there was no stopping. The more I planted, the more I had to tend to, and the more I enjoyed my garden. I had thought that once you plant a garden, you watch it grow from afar (boy, was I green!). I found out that gardening is an interactive experience, with the grower right there in the front trenches, the raised beds, and alongside the irrigation hoses.
When I started to garden, I grew only shrubs and flowers. A couple years passed. While lamenting some leaf mold on a rosebush, I had this crazy idea. Perhaps in addition to my plants and flowers, I could grow vegetables. The thought of pressing a dry-looking seed into the ground, watching it sprout, grow, and mature, and eating whatever had grown was exciting to a City Chick. Mom had grown tomatoes, potatoes, and grapes in the garden I grew up in. Now, I thought, it was my turn.
Because the yard is small, I had to make room for a veggie patch. My spouse rented a jackhammer and chiseled away one-third of the uncovered patio. We recycled the concrete pieces into garden stepping stones, put up wood framing to create a raised bed, and hauled in what seemed like a hundred wheelbarrows' worth of premium soil for the bed. After a couple seasons, I had a small vegetable garden crammed full of fresh herbs, cabbage, eggplant, onions, garlic, tomatoes, squash, green beans, and several varieties of lettuce.
There I was, a City Chick growing and eating my own vegetables right there in the middle of a metropolis. And the best part was that growing fresh veggies, while not particularly difficult, was very rewarding. The more herbs and vegetables I grew, the more empowered I felt to grow others. The jackhammer came home again, and I soon had another patch of dirt in which to grow fresh food. I planted with the passionate fervor of Scarlet O'Hara. Harvests abounded. Tomatoes tumbled from tomato cages; lettuce lined up thick as a lawn; jalapeños jumped off the plants.
As I ate more and more fresh food from my garden, I noticed that I became more and more picky about how food tasted. After all, if I was taking the time to chew it, it had better taste good. I stumbled upon an important concept: Fresh and organic = good. Since the prices of certified organic vegetables are higher than the current worth of my retirement stock account, and probably will be for some time, growing my own vegetables is a valuable endeavor.
Without realizing it, I started hearing voices. Voices talking about chickens. My spouse had often told me childhood stories about keeping chickens while growing up in Oakland, California, always speaking fondly of those city hens and their antics. Also, my mother and father never stopped talking about the chickens of their youth. Though I was unaware of it, for years a very strong "chicken vibe" reverberated along my lifeline. In fact, my family was always talking about chickens. Chickens, chickens, chicken talk all the time. The only person not talking chicken was me.
I never gave this much thought, until One Day.
One Day, while walking in my neighborhood, I was surprised to come upon some chickens. There they were, strutting and digging around in a narrow picket-fenced side yard. It was a serene setting, with irises and azaleas growing in the coop and the colorful chickens in the foreground. Walking on, I saw that their owner had built them a quaint henhouse inside an enclosed run. Metal sculptures were hung near and above the coop, giving it an artsy feel. Something about the sight of those chickens on a city street corner was really cool. And the birds (about four of them) were rather cute, walking about nonchalantly, then bending over with force and precision, beak picking up whatever beady chicken eyes saw crawling through the dirt.
That evening, I was baking and thinking about those chickens. On account of my ravenous sweet tooth and my disappointment with most commercial cakes and sweets, I bake just about every day. As I finished cracking eight eggs into a bowl for a flourless chocolate cake, I had a rich thought: This cake would taste so better with fresh eggs! A neighbor had a small flock down the street. My spouse had had chickens in a dense bedroom community in California. And thanks to Mom and Dad's nostalgic reminiscences, I had been unknowingly indoctrinated in chicken-speak and knew quite a bit about those birds. Given all this, why couldn't I have my very own chickens here in Portland?
My next not-so-rhetorical question was "Is it legal to keep chickens in the city?" As I worked at that time as a paralegal, I knew the answer would be found in my city's municipal code. A municipal code or city code is a city's codified or statutory governing law. Depending on where you live — a city, town, or township, for example, the codes may also be known as ordinances, codes of ordinances, regulations, revised municipal codes, or general provisions. Many cities have their city codes posted on the Internet. Portland was no exception. After a few clicks online, I found my city codes and ordinances pertaining to chickens, which told me that within the city limits of Portland, residents can keep up to three hens without a permit. Additional hens could be kept, though a $25 annual permit was required. Also, the city codes had certain restrictions on keeping the coop area away from neighbors' kitchen windows. The final rule: No roosters allowed. That was okay with me, because I wanted hens for eggs, not for baby chicks.
When I told my spouse I wanted chickens, I expected the usual response to one of my wacky ideas: a slight, wary smile accompanied by that "Oh ... right" look and a sad shaking of the head from side to side. Instead, my spouse grinned broadly, pumped a fist in the air, and shouted, "All right! Chickens!" (Actually, the reaction was somewhat more muted, but positive nonetheless.) After seventeen years, I guess we can still surprise each other.
I surveyed the backyard. This took about a minute. On a 3,300-square-foot lot, there's not a lot to survey. In nine years, most of the front and back yards were landscaped. The only thing left undone was a narrow, unused side yard that looked rather tawdry in contrast to the rest of the garden. It was choked with weeds, scrap wood, chipped bricks, and bad dirt. (I did say tawdry, right?) It was so messy and needed so much work that I had no choice but to ignore its existence.
Even if that unpromising patch of earth was cleaned up to make room for gardening, sunlight was restricted on that particular side of the house. There wasn't hope for me to grow much in this area. Before I had started "thinking chicken," the only appealing option was to completely cement over this side yard and build a shed to store the lawn mower and garden tools. Exciting, huh? Luckily, I had a healthy streak of procrastination running through me. I had done nothing with the side yard for almost ten years. After all, it was a nearly unworkable area. Little did I know that this meant it would be perfect for a coop and a small flock of city chickens.
Keeping in mind the setback requirements of our city code, we planned a relatively spacious, sturdy, covered coop and henhouse. With my spouse's mental blueprints and amateur knowledge of basic carpentry, the structure slowly rose out of the debris that was once a messy side yard. We worked in our spare time in the evenings and on weekends, and the project took about three weeks. We sunk the main support posts, put up the framing and roof, cut and fit four doors for the coop and henhouse, attached the requisite chicken wire, and painted the entire structure. It took a couple more days to clear out the debris behind the coop and to set up a dry place to store straw and chicken feed.
I had been studying my Murray McMurray Hatchery catalog for months. I could almost see the chicken illustrations in my sleep, and I had about a dozen favorites and alternates already in mind. After the coop and henhouse were up, I called a few local feed stores to see who had baby chicks. Chicks are seasonal in availability; thankfully, it was spring, when they're most available. We found a store with the breeds we wanted. We got the chicks. Over the summer, we watched them grow up into chickens. Ever since then, we have had fresh eggs almost every day. And my cakes and cookies have never tasted better!
At the time of this writing, I have three big lovely hens: Lucy (a Rhode Island Red), Zsa Zsa (a Barred Plymouth Rock), and Whoopee (an Australorp). I refer to the constituents of my own urban flock collectively as "the Girls." The Girls joined my family as chicks, I raised them through pullethood (pullets are adolescent hens) into their adult existence, and I will have them until they retire. ("Retirement" for chickens is not necessarily a euphemism for chicken dinner. See chapter 2 for details.)
So there it is, the tale of my transformation from city chick to urban chicken keeper. Each day my little flock of hens helps me find the taste of the good, simple life. And I feel a sense of pride and security in being able to feed my family and me from my urban garden, both vegetables and protein, thanks to my chickens.
CHAPTER 2
Why Keep Chickens?
Until about 50 years ago, it was common to keep a few chickens on one's property, however modest the parcel. Cities had not yet spilled over onto adjacent farmlands and rural residences. Folks grew a good portion of their own food. Chickens were an integral part of the family food chain. Small flocks of chickens coexisted with "kitchen gardens," compact plots of earth growing enough greens and vegetables for a family. Three, four, perhaps a dozen hens provided the household with eggs and meat. Fresh food was available right outside the back door.
In those days, chickens were part of everyday life. With the rooster's crow at dawn, hens in the henhouse would stir from sleep, as would the humans in the peoplehouse. During the morning, somebody would let the hens out into the yard and collect any "early bird" eggs. The chickens roamed around all day, scratching for bugs and grit and laying eggs in secretive nooks of the yard. In the late afternoon, someone would toss a few handfuls of grain into the coop to lure back the free-ranging chickens, and the kids were sent out to search for the eggs.
Life got busier over the next several decades. Personal time and space, and especially backyard size for single-family homes, decreased. Progress became the defining buzzword and underlying foundation of a "good and successful" life. To pursue Progress, whether by choice or at the whim of destiny, people moved away from their spacious rural homes and into compact and convenient urban and suburban communities. With their migration, one of life's most prized possessions — personal self-sufficiency — was lost. As a consequence of shrinking yard space, garden flocks or family flocks of chickens disappeared from household yards and were culturally banished to the margins of farm life. At the same time that chickens flew the household coop, chicken ranching was growing into an agribusiness. In place of family hens roosting on a picket fences or scratching beneath the kitchen window, gigantic chicken farms and egg-production "factories" sprawled across the landscape. With Progress nipping at the heels of the mid-twentieth century, chickens became more than family food — chickens were big money for big new chicken businesses. Times had changed for chickens and for Americans. In France, chickens have historically been a symbol of good fortune and prosperity. In the United States, chickens have become a nostalgic icon of a way of life now gone by.
The past two or three generations of Americans — the Baby Boomers — never considered keeping a small flock of chickens as pets or private egg suppliers. Chickens were considered dirty, noisy, stupid, and needing more care than busy city folks in pursuit of Progress could offer. Progress, together with then-adolescent Convenience, convinced us that easy-to-obtain, commercially produced eggs were just as good as home-grown fresh eggs.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Keep Chickens!"
by .
Copyright © 2003 Barbara Kilarski.
Excerpted by permission of Storey Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 From City Chick to Urban Chickens
2 Why Keep Chickens?
Chicken Care Is Easy
Fresh Eggs
Pest Control
Top-Notch Fertilizer
Chickens in the Garden
Art, Pets & Entertainment
Pondering Urban Flocks
3 Chicken Basics
Chicken History
Definitions
Chicken FAQs
4 Chickens and the Law
Courtesy First: Talk to Your Neighbors
Chicken Codes
5 Building a Coop
What's in a Coop?
How Big?
To Roof or Not to Roof?
Building in Cold or Hot Climates
The Right Coop in the Right Place
Breaking Ground
Building a Coop for the Girls
Rats!
6 How to Pick a Chick
Research
Classifying Chickens
Three Makes Company
Climatic Considerations
Good Breeds for a Backyard Flock
Where to Get Chicks
How to Pick Chicks
7 Chicken Care
The Care of Little 'Uns
Sick Chicks
Feeders and Waterers
Eggs, Eggs, Eggs!
Coop Care
Extreme Weather Care
Health & Fitness
Molting
8 Eggcellent Eats
Epilogue: A Day in the Life of an Urban Chicken Keeper
Photo Gallery: A Chicken Extravaganza
Appendix: Summary of Selected City Municipal Codes
Recommended Reading
Chicks & Chicken Supplies
Chicken Information & Organizations
Index