Backyard Chickens 101: Chicken Resources
Putting together this week’s Backyard Chickens 101 posts has been a lot of fun! For the final installment, I’ve gathered together a list of my favorite city chicken resources.
Chicken Classes
Seattle Tilth offers lots of city chickens classes, including Starting with Baby Chicks, City Chickens 101, and a coop design class. I took City Chickens 101 before we got our birds and it was awesome. They also have a lot of great information on their website, including an archive of their chicken-centric newsletter Scoop from the Coop.
Lots of other organizations around the country offer beginning chicken classes including The Garden for the Environment, Common Ground Organics and Love Apple Farm in the San Francisco Bay Area, Codman Farm in Massachusetts, Angelic Organics near Chicago, Pistils Nursery in Portland, Oregon, and Just Food in New York City. If you know of other organizations that offer city chicken classes, let me know and I’ll add them to this list.
Books
Living with Chickens: Everything You Need to Know to Raise Your Own Backyard Flock.
The Fairest Fowl: Portraits of Championship Chickens.
Websites
FeatherSite.com: This site is a great resource if you can get past the confusing, old-school web design. They have a great section that details pretty much every breed that you can think of.
Backyardchickens.com: Another fun web-based resource. They have a great message board where you can post chicken keeping questions and an awesome database of coop designs.
I’m in San Francisco this weekend and next week. I’m going to be speaking at the Garden Show and checking out local gardens and nurseries. Stay tuned next week for a full report, plus some cool DIY projects. Have a good weekend!
Great shot
March 20th, 2009 at 3:28 pmI caught a very brief snippet of a piece on NPR the other day…what I caught said that grow-your-own chickens are up so much this year that chick suppliers are having a tough time keeping up with demand. Anyone know more about this? I suppose I could try to dig it up on NPR, but seemed to tie in here well too…??
March 20th, 2009 at 4:18 pmHi Willi,
March 23rd, 2009 at 3:48 pmI have been greatly enjoying the chicken mini-series, which has only increased my desire to have a few feathered friends of our own. A friend alerted me to the potential for rats and other nasties to be attracted to the chicken feed and said that it is extremely difficult to vermin-proof the coop. This left me a little worried. Have you had any problems with rats getting into the feed?
–Gaea in Georgetown
Gaea–We have not had a problem with rats getting into our feed. We do have rats in our garage, but we keep the feed in galvanized buckets with lids. You can lock the lids onto the buck by putting the handle up. We keep our chicken feed inside the coop. I have heard of people having rat problems, so I don’t know if we are just lucky or if our system works
March 25th, 2009 at 10:49 amThanks, Willi!
March 27th, 2009 at 6:58 pmMy neighbor started keeping chickens this past spring. After this last snow, I noticed tons of rat prints in our yard. Previous year’s snows only showed a couple of tracks. This was a marked difference.
I would like to keep chickens, too, but would like to have any advice on keeping chicken feed away from rats. Especially the feed that is fed to the chickens each day. Do chickens eat everything you give them?
December 1st, 2010 at 8:36 pmChristy–We keep our chicken feed inside our house and their food inside their coop. We give them small amounts of cracked corn and treats like leftover rice in their run, which they always gobble up immediately. At night we close the coop, so the rats don’t have access to the food. We’ve never had a rodent problem and I know for a fact there are quite a few rats in our immediate area because both of our neighbors have big blackberry brambles in their yards. Hope this helps!
December 2nd, 2010 at 11:36 amI would love to keep chickens but just don’t have the space maybe one day:)
May 2nd, 2011 at 10:20 pmWilli, I have a question for you about chickens. We are new to it this year and are just about to change from baby chick food to big girl food. We want to use an organic feed for them and wondered if you have one you like. We live in Bellevue, shop at the Issaquah Grange and sometimes DeYoungs but can really go anyway in the area that might have something you have found.
July 10th, 2011 at 6:08 pmthanks for your time.