Happy June! I am in love with this month’s chicken themed desktop calendar from Anne Bryant. Jon and I have kept chickens for four years and I am pleased to say that our girls recently made the move to Portland from Seattle. It was quite the journey. Placing them into individual cardboard boxes and loading them into the car turned out to be the easiest part, because about half way to Portland I got pulled over. It was 10:15 at night and when the officer leaned into the car to collect my license and registration the girls decided to make their presence known. “Bwak. Bwak,” they said quietly. The officer gave me a quizzical look and directed his flashlight to the back of the car. Four little boxes were neatly lined up, along with a bale of wood shavings, two galvanized cans of food, and other assorted chicken accoutrements. “Bwak. Bawk. Bwak.” I put on my best smile and said, “Um, yes, officer, I have my chickens in the back of the car. I’m moving them down to their new coop in Portland.” He gave me a look that said, “I see the weirdest stuff in this job” and headed to his patrol car. He came back, issued me a warning, and wished us good luck on our move. Phew! Apparently the girls are good for more than their eggs.

To put this month’s calendar on your computer’s desktop, all you need to do is click on this link—it will take you to a page where you choose can choose the file size that best fits your monitor. The calendar will then automatically download to your computer and you can set it up as your background image.

Also, for all my Seattle readers, please consider attending the NW Lawn & Garden Summit this Saturday from 9:00 to 2:30. People from the community are gathering to explore options for passing a ban on the usage of pesticides for cosmetic use—similar to the one already in place in Canada. Pesticides from home gardens cause significant pollution in the city’s streams and have a profound impact on the health of salmon and Puget Sound. Even if you cannot make it to the event, check out this great article on a study that shows the correlation between pesticide concentrations in local streams and sales of these products at local retail outlets. It really reminded me of the many reasons why I have always been an organic gardener.

Last Friday I was lucky enough to be included in a day long kitchen garden symposium hosted by The Garden Conservancy in Marin County, California. The day began with lectures and ended with tours of two exquisite private kitchen gardens. I’ll be sharing photos of both gardens later in the week, but I wanted to start with a peek of the chicken coop I spotted in the Collenette family’s absolutely magical kitchen garden.

The coop, which was made by California Coops, is constructed of recycled barn wood and other reclaimed materials, including a slightly rusty corrugated metal roof. I loved the windows, which are actually old picture frames fitted with hardware cloth. The coop is lofted off the ground on stilts and has a trapdoor in the floor. This allows you to attach a custom covered run to the bottom, if you like.

The weathered wood was dotted with bits of lichen and had a wonderful rustic patina to it.

Shirley Collenette also has a chicken tractor that she moves around the garden, but her flock of young hens spend the evening safely locked up in the coop, which is located at the edge of the garden nestled amongst plants and sheltered by the wide boughs of a tree above. If the coop had been just a little bit bigger, I would have considered moving into it myself.

Our chicken, Inky, laid a teensy, tiny brown egg that is flecked with chocolate brown. The baby egg, as I’ve taken to calling it, is about one-quarter the size of her normal eggs, which are brown, but not speckled. I have no idea why this happened. She is eating the same food, drinking the same water, nothing has changed.

She’s back to laying normal size eggs. Apparently the baby egg was a one off.

I adore my four hens, Inky, Clyde, Bumble and Boo. I can’t help it, even though they occasionally rampage my garden, escape from the yard, and wake me up very, very early in the morning. They are just so cute and lovable. Especially Inky. She follows me around the yard and coos contentedly when I pet her.

So I was super excited when Bay Area-artist and gardener Rigel Stuhmiller emailed me to say she has a new line of rooster and hen prints in the works. She will be creating a hand-pulled, hand-carved chicken block print each week until she “runs out of chickens or out of steam”! She’s playing around with the texture and tone of the prints—so each one will be unique. Most amazing of all, she’s selling these prints for only forty-five dollars in her Etsy store, making them a special and affordable gift for all those chicken lovers out there.

I know I promised a pepper growing guide for you today, but it’s not quite done. So I thought I’d share a few snaps of the coolest chicken tractors I’ve seen. They belong to Cheri Van Hoover and her husband Rocky, who garden in a to-die-for spot near Port Townsend, Washington.

The couple’s lovely vegetable garden overlooks a wetland area and orchard and is framed in on all sides by an adorable white picket fence. Cheri’s daughter designed the chicken tractors to fit right over the garden’s raised beds, so the chickens can dig for insect larave, leave little deposits of nitrogen, and aerate the soil.  I took these photos when I stopped by their garden in January and was excited to see that Cheri and Rocky raise Buff Orpingtons, too! I’m hoping to get an invite to visit again this summer so I can share photos of the garden when it is full of vegetables.

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. This guide covers all the basics you need to know and is pretty readable, too.

The Fairest Fowl: Portraits of Championship Chickens. Pages and pages of pretty chicken pictures. Plus, Ira Glass wrote it. Need I say more?

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!

I’ve got some seriously cool chicken coops to show you today, courtesy of Seattle Tilth, which hosts an annual City Chickens Coop Tour every July. This self-guided tour takes you to different neighborhoods around Seattle, where you can check out a bunch of coops, meet the chickens that live in them, and talk to the chicken keepers. This year’s tour is on July 11, so mark your calendars!

Sadly, our coop is not worthy of being on the tour. We bought it at a local feed store and have been really disappointed with its quality and how difficult it is to access for cleaning. We are considering building a new coop for our girls this fall that has the following qualities:

* A bigger run. I want a covered run that has at least 8 to 10 square feet per bird

* Doors that are raised above the ground. This makes them easier to close because they don’t get clogged with bedding that the chickens kick around.

* Easy access for cleaning. Right now I have to lean into our coop, which makes it difficult to scoop out the bedding, and getting in that close of contact with the chicken poo is kind of gross.

* Built with recycled, durable materials. Most of my favorite coops incorporate recycled windows, doors, and wood. They end up having so much character, and are easier on the environment since they minimize the use of new materials. I like the look of corrugated metals roofs, but I also love, love the green roof on the coop pictured up top. It is the coolest!!

This coop is positively palatial. I think my girls would run away from home if I showed them the photo. I like its clean, modern design and that it has both enclosed and unenclosed runs and is tall enough to stand up in.

This portable coop makes great use of recycled materials and I love the classic barn red color and shape. I think that the entire front (where the doors are) hinges open, making the inside a snap to clean up.

Our next coop will definitely feature a handy exterior nest box like this one. These nest boxes make it super easy to access the eggs, and the hens seem to prefer them, too.

If building a coop is not your forte, high quality, pre-built coops are available, but they are pricey. I am particularly fond of Wine Country Coops and Henspa. You could also hire someone to build the coop. In Seattle, Jennifer Carlson teaches a coop design class at Seattle Tilth and also offers private city chickens consultations, and Seattle Urban Farm Company also builds custom coops.

We love having chickens, but I definitely recommend carefully considering all the benefits (free eggs! great fertilizer! cute chicken antics!) and the drawbacks (cleaning the coop, feeding and watering them in the pouring, freezing rain) before your get them. So for the second installment of Backyard Chickens 101, I’ve pulled together a few things for you to consider:

Know the rules. Before we got our girls I checked out the Seattle Municipal Code that covers keeping chickens. I learned that because our 6500 square foot lot was above average size, we could legally keep four chickens (lots 5000 feet and under can only have three) and that roosters aren’t illegal. We luckily don’t live in a neighborhood with a homeowner’s association, but if you do, check the bylaws before you buy birds.

Be sure you have enough time. All in all taking care of a small flock of chickens is not a ton of work. Jon and I agree that it falls somewhere in between keeping a goldfish and a cat. But consider this: chickens wake up at first light and need to be let out of their coop soon their after. You must also tuck them into bed at dusk to protect them from predators. They need fresh food and water every morning, and clean bedding about once a week, and a couple of times a year you need to clean out their whole coop and run and give everything a good scrub. Before you get your birds, I recommend talking with your family about how you will split up the chicken care so it doesn’t become an issue later.

Make nice with your neighbors, especially if you like to travel. Before we got the chickens, I let our immediate neighbors in on the plan. I told them we were placing their coop far from their bedroom windows and would be giving them lots of free eggs. This worked like a charm, and my neighbor Elaine even told me that she loves hearing my chickens in the morning (and I thought I was the only one!). Since chickens need to be taken care of twice a day, every day it makes planning to go away for the weekend slightly more complicated. We’ve dealt with this by teaching five families on our block how to watch the girls and paying them with fresh eggs.

And finally…I will tell you something that no one told me. Chickens poo a lot. Like twenty times a day. They tend to leave their slippery deposits in inconvenient places around our yard, including on the deck and the arm of our beloved sun chair. This, um, habit of theirs certainly shouldn’t be a deal breaker, but I wanted you all to know.

Tomorrow I have a list of my favorite chicken resources and I am putting up a coop guide on Friday.

Two years ago Jon and I bought four cute little hens that we named Inky, Pinky, Blinky, and Clyde. The only problem?

Pinky and Blinky were roosters. And they made an awful lot of noise in the morning. So I called around and found a nice farmer who let us trade in the roosters for two real hens, who we called Bumble and Boo. Since springtime is just around the corner, and bunches of fluffy little chicks are showing up at feed stores and garden centers, I’ve decided to put together a series of posts called Backyard Chickens 101. I’m going to share some basic chicken advice, show off a few inspirational coops, name my favorite resources, and let you in on how we trained our 85-pound mutt to coexist peacefully with our hens.

First, let me introduce you to our girls:

Meet Clyde. She is a lovely Araucana who lays exceptionally large blue eggs. Don’t you just love her silly, feather-y sideburns? Clyde, like many Araucanas, is a little bit aloof. She looks a bit fierce in this photo, but in real life she actually has a funny, cooky personality and makes the cutest cooing noises when you pet her.

Bumble and Boo are Buff Orpingtons. If they were human, they would definitely be the bad girls who like to sneak out of the house and drive around with older boys in fast cars. They stay up later than our other girls, sleep in longer, and always manage to find a way into the vegetable garden for some unauthorized snacking. Luckily, they have very cute, downy rear ends and lovable bird-brained personalities. They also lay lots of pale brown eggs.

Inky is my favorite chicken. I know you’re not supposed to have favorites, but I can’t help it. Inky is a Black Australorp and she is crazy curious. Last summer I left the backdoor open and a few minutes later I found Inky in our kitchen checking herself out in the door of the dishwasher. She also loves to follow our dog, Domino, around the backyard and she lays beautiful almond colored eggs.

Now that you’ve seen our chickens’ glamour shots, don’t you want a few of your own? Good! Here are a few more details about Inky, Clyde, Bumble and Boo Boo:

Chicks or Pullets: Chicks are newborn chickens and they require lots of warmth, attention, and room to grow. Since we have a very small house, we bought pullets, which are 12-week-old hens. The nice thing about pullets is they can go outside into the coop immediately (no need for a brooder light) and they start laying eggs in about 3 months (instead of 6 with chicks).

Where to find chickens: We found ads for pullets on Craig’s List and bought Inky and Clyde from Barnyard Gardens–a small nursery and farm on the Kitsap Peninusla that I highly recommend. We also found the boys—Pinky and Blinky—on Craig’s List. So it is not entirely reliable. If you can’t find pullets on Craig’s List, call your local 4-H, feed stores, or look on meetup.com or Yahoo! Groups to see if there is a chicken enthusiast group in your area (I belong to Seattle’s Chicken Lovers Group).

Breeds: One Araucana, two Buff Orpingtons, and one Black Australorp

Free range vs. Cooped Up: We let them range in our backyard when we are home, which is a slight risk because some predators, especially raccoons, do prowl around during the day. But our dog does a good job patrolling our yard, so we feel pretty comfortable letting the chickens roam free when we are within earshot. When we’re away from home, we lock them into their coop and attached, covered outdoor run.

Eggs: Approximately 3 each day from February through November, their laying tapers off during the darkest months. The eggs are gorgeous and we eat them all the time. FYI, you don’t need roosters to get eggs—you only need them if you want chicks.

Food: Organic layer mash (we get it at Hayes Feed & Country Store in Burien for about $28 a bag), cracked corn, grass, worms and insects, and table scraps. Our hens’ eggs have bright orange yolks because the green grass they nibble on everyday contains healthful carotenoid pigments that contribute to the color of the yolks.

Coop Bedding: Aspen shavings. We found that straw gets slimey and smelly. The aspen bedding and chicken manure composts quickly when mixed with grass clippings or green garden waste, making it easy for us to recycle all the bedding right in our own yard.

Will We Eat Them When They Get Old? Jon is a vegetarian. Enough said.

Tomorrow I’ll give you a few pointers on getting your first flock and some advice on coops and pictures of awesome coops from The Seattle Tilth City Chickens Coop Tour (coming up this year on July 11 ).

I saw this chicken on Design*Sponge this morning and I think I need it. Why? I have no idea. But since I already have four real chickens, why not add a green, plastic rocking hen to the mix?

Speaking of chickens, I’ve been getting a lot of emails lately about raising chickens in the city. So I’m working on a series of posts for next week on the joys of having four living creatures that like to squawk, scratch and, um, make deposits all over your yard.

Stay tuned!