Claire's sign welcomed people to the garden.

Among the many lovely people we met were Alison, whose delightful blog called A Bit of Butter features vintage recipes, and Jessi, an ecological landscaper with a beautiful website and a special interest in gardening with chickens.  The garden drew almost as much attention as the hens, and the whole day reminded me how the interest in connecting with food and nature through our home lives is such a deep-running current.

The flow of people in the garden was steady throughout the day.

Recently there was a long article in the Seattle Times that was rather critical about the recent popularity of backyard chicken-keeping.  The author cited concerns about odor, noise, and quoted folks who said things like, “If people want to keep chickens they should live in the country.”  In a media frenzy that has played up the positives of urban chickens, I welcome this article as adding some nuance to the choice of whether or not to keep chickens.  My hope is that all of us will consider ways to grow some of our own food from home, to find that even in cities we are deeply connected to life and soil.  But the worst thing that could happen is for the chicken “trend” to end up being just that–a “trend.”  Chickens should not be “The New Black.”  It takes more than initial enthusiasm to keep chickens–it takes commitment over time, and occasionally some tough choices (if you are vegetarians like us, what do you do when you chickens stop laying?).  That’s one of the reasons we were so happy to be part of the Coop Tour–the very best kind of community event, where people could gather to ask questions, share experience, pet chickens, nibble peas, plan and scheme, see the reality while dreaming big.

The map for the tour is available all over Seattle–see the Seattle Tilth Coop Tour page for details.  Maps are $30 for a family, or carload/cycling group of 4.  Proceeds benefit Tilth–one of our favorite local nonprofits.

Are you a West Seattle-ite looking to stay in the ‘hood?  For just $15 you can get a map to both the local edible garden tour, and the West Seattle section of the Coop tour.  You’ll be supporting another of our favorite groups:  Glean It/Community Harvest.  See their website for details.

Join the tour!  Come see us!  We’ll have a big plate of cookies going, and we’d love to meet you and talk chicken as we join together in finding new, creative, delightful ways to participate in our food lives and the cycles of nature from our urban homes.

When we gathered our eggs to dye this Easter, we paused to gape at them.  Our little hens lay eggs in the most beautiful colors.  How could we possibly improve on these shades of mauve, cocoa, and sepia?  Still, this is a season of wonder.  Brown eggs take a little longer to dye, but the result is so lovely–more subtle, more earthy, muted jewel tones. Happy Spring, everyone.

In our last house, we re-purposed a corner of the separate garage for a coop, but this time we started from scratch.  Having lost hens to both raccoons and feral ferrets (!), we incorporated lessons from harsh experience into our coop design.  Still, I was thinking “Chicken coop:  we’ll hammer four walls together, add a roof, cut a little door, fence it up good, and Voila!”  Then my dad called–my dad Jerry, the stone mason, from the “If You’re Gonna Build It, Build It Right” school.  He said, “I need a little project.  You wouldn’t mind if I helped work on your chicken coop, would you?”  I know he secretly feared what we’d build without him.  With Jerry’s expertise, we ended up with a coop that is as beautiful as it is functional.

For four hens, we chose to build a 6×4′ raised coop, with an enclosed area beneath, set inside a larger, fully-enclosed aviary.  As you can see, the coop is raised on cedar posts set in concrete footing, and framed they way you would build any small shed. It has a sloped roof with an overhang on all four sides. We used a hodgepodge of leftover, gifted, used, and new materials, and spent a few hundred dollars. The wood for the walls is half inch plywood, which happens to have a stamped pattern on it (it is not T-111, which isn’t sturdy enough for wet Seattle weather).  At the end of this post there’s a downloadable plan with all the dimensions of our coop.

Our coop design has two doors: a big “human door” in the front for easy access, egg gathering, ventilation, and cleaning, and a chicken door on the left side with a ramp.

We leave both of them open during  the day, and although the chickens can jump in and out of the human door, they usually prefer to use the chicken door.  So funny!  Of course all gates and doors latch tightly.

Though the chickens have a larger run, underneath the coop we built a cage Tom calls “Chicken Guantanamo,” where they can be outdoors and still be fully protected if we need to leave them for an extended period. We completely enclosed the area beneath the coop with 1/2 inch metal hardware cloth, buried 10 inches into the ground. We also buried a “floor” of hardware cloth several inches under ground, and sewed it with wire to the buried fence to prevent burrowing by rats/raccoons. Chicken wire is not acceptable, as raccoons can reach right through it and grab a chicken. We made a discovery: the hardware store carries sturdy arched nails called “poultry net staples” for attaching the hardware cloth.

The cage below the coop is accessed from the outside through a small gate which, when open, allows the chickens into the covered area for shade, and protection from the rain.  But more importantly, we  designed it so that if we need to leave overnight, we open a trapdoor on the floor of the coop,  and give the chickens full access to the coop and the outdoor cage beneath it while keeping them safe.  Most days we don’t use the trap door at all–we just let them out in the yard during the day, and close them up in the coop at night.  But the trap door to “Guantanamo” works great when we need it, and we’ve been grateful for this setup many times.

Marigold the Buff Orpington, going down the ramp from the trap door. The slats on the chicken ramps look cute and "chicken-coopish," but they are also necessary--the chickens really use them to keep from sliding.

The roof has a ten inch overhang, and even during this year’s wet, blustery Seattle winter, not a drop of water got in the coop.  My friend JoJo gave me a bundle of cedar shakes he’d picked up somewhere years ago–they have a tattered label, and are clear, old growth western red cedar, milled locally in 1964! I wouldn’t buy old growth cedar today (even if I could afford it), but was grateful to put these to use.  Jerry covered the roof with roofing cloth before nailing down the shakes.

To prevent future warping, Jerry insisted on cedar for all the gates and door frames.

Around the coop is a fully-enclosed chicken yard. For this we used “hog wire,” which is both stronger, and looks nicer than chicken wire. The raccoons in our neighborhood are bold, and wander about in broad daylight–it was absolutely necessary to have the overhead protection. Some urban chicken farmers just create a little closed-in pen, covered at waist-height, but we love to hang out with the chickens, and wanted to be comfortable standing in their yard. We like to let the girls range freely in our backyard when supervised, but most of the time we keep them in their run, safe from neighborhood predators, dogs, and away from the garden.

Some chicken keepers leave the water and food out during the day.  I like to keep it in the coop, so I don’t have to move it inside at night.  You can make your own feeder/waterers, but these metal ones from the feed store are hard to beat.  Hanging the food keeps it free from litter, and discourages the chickens from sitting on top of it (and pooping there…).  But the water sloshes from a chain, so I just put it up on some bricks to keep it out of the coop litter (currently we’re using coffee chaff).

One rookie coop building error is the construction of a nest box for every single chicken.  We promise you– as we discovered ourselves with out first coop–that no matter how many nest boxes you have, the chickens will all lay their eggs in one nest!  Why??? We don’t know, but it’s true…One nest box suffices for four hens. The wooden crates that you can find in dumpsters outside of vegetable stands make perfect nest boxes.  I nailed a board across the bottom to keep the straw in. There are also natural branches inside the coop for nocturnal roosting.

The very best part of our coop?  Our daughter Claire’s old wooden crate, in the aviary.  She sits there with the chickens for an hour at a time,  petting them when they jump in her lap.  Sometimes she brings a book.  She says she feels just like Fern in Charlotte’s Web. We leave an old raincoat by the backdoor, and her boots, and she cuddles the  chickens in all weather.

Here’s a simple plan for our coop (PDF), ready for your own modifications. The photos from this post, and more images of our coop and foul endeavors, are in Tom’s Flickr account (at a higher resolution and under a Creative Commons license – feel free to re-use them).

Yes, it's painted orange and green--a pleasing mix-match from the leftovers of friends' housepainting projects.

Obviously we love our coop and it brought us pleasure to build it, though it did take the better part of five days, and the support of my experienced and indefatigable dad (Thanks, Jerry!). But don’t feel daunted! The web is full of great examples of simple coops made inexpensively from found materials (as well as coops much fancier than ours!). Or find inspiration, as we did, in the terrific book, Chicken Coops: 45 Building Plans for Housing Your Flock. Better still, have a look at what your chicken keeping neighbors are up to.  Chickens are great for local community building, and everyone loves to talk about their own chickens and coop.  If you hear clucking on a neighborhood walk, see if the chicken farmer is around and say “hi.”  And if you have questions or ideas that worked wonderfully in your own coop, we’d love to hear them!

Here are previous chicken-related posts on The Tangled Nest, including this one on caring for chicks in a homemade biddy box.  There are tons of resources for urban chicken farmers on the web, including this great page by Seattle Tilth.

A few weeks ago, David sent an email around to his many intrepid gardener friends, inviting us to try out coffee bean chaff–the light, airy husks blown off the beans during roasting–as mulch and compost.  I said “sure,” and it wasn’t long before David darkened my doorstep with a big bag of the fluffy stuff.

I admit I wasn’t feeling super-hopeful about the mulch idea–the chaff is so soft and light, and the winter garden is so wet and mucky–I thought I might wait until spring.  But David mentioned he’d been using it in place of wood chips in the chicken coop, and that captured my imagination.  Next time I cleaned out the coop, I replaced the white wood shavings with a few inches of coffee chaff.

The chickens were hilarious.  Like cats, they can be unnerved by novelty, and I wasn’t sure what they would think of their new chaffy home.  But they all immediately ran into the coop, and started “playing” in the chaff, tossing it up with their bills.  SO funny.  There are pros and cons to coffee chaff in the chicken coop, but on balance, I’ve decided to keep using it.  Here’s my report:

Cons: So light that it flies around, gets in the chicken water.  Turns slimy when wet.

Pros: Free!  Upcycled!  No link to the timber industry.  Smells like coffee.  Light–easy to handle.  Clumps with chicken poop a bit  like scoopable kitty litter–easy to remove from coop.  Swiftly composts.

At first the chaff is so ultra-fluffy, the chickens sort of sink in it. They seem to really enjoy this!

Most coffee roasters will be happy to pass their chaff along to you. Just ask. Usually it is just tossed into the compost bin or, more often, the landfill.  Spent coffee grounds and over-roasted beans are often available as well (check out this little article by Seattle garden doyenne Ann Lovejoy about the many uses for coffee industry by-products–for mulch, compost, garden paths…).  Coffee chaff is rich in nitrogen and other nutrients, and I look forward to mixing it with my vegetable garden mulch.  Tomatoes are reputed to love the stuff.  David is also looking into the use of those great burlap bags in which coffee is imported as a replacement for that plastic weed-blocking material (see his website for info on obtaining and using post-coffee burlap).   More to come on all of this…

Meanwhile, if you are a latte-sipping urban chicken farmer, I hope you’ll give coffee bean chaff a try in your coop, and let us know how it works for you!

Have you ever heard of a wrinkled egg? An egg with 2 yolks? A gray egg with bumps all over? Well, neither had I until our chickens started laying.

Esmerelda, Chrysanthemum, Buttercup, and Marigold

On the first day of laying, my mom came out to me saying, “Claire! We’ve got our first egg!” And when I looked I saw a tiny, brown sphere with white specks all over it. Small, but beautiful. The white dots add character. After about a week, I went out to check for an egg. As I picked it up, I noticed something was different. The egg was lumpy. I took a look at it. Who would have thought that of all the things that could have happened, we got a wrinkled egg!!

So far the chickens have laid two wrinkled eggs!!

Several days later, I went out and found a normal sized egg. Until then all of the eggs they had been laying had been rather small (and cute!).

“Mommy, we’ve got a normal sized one for once!” I said, walking through the door. We cracked it open and two yellow blobs/yolks plopped out!

A double yolker!!

And, lastly, one day I came home from school and my mom showed me the wackiest looking egg. I honestly don’t know how our innocent little chickens came to produce such a thing! It was an ugly shade of gray, and it had little bumps all over. If it made a chick, the chick would look something like the ugly duckling. These eggs are tough luck!

P.S. Please don’t be worried. We’ve also been getting beautiful, smooth, brown eggs almost every day.

Claire thought it particularly wonderful that Esmeralda's first egg arrived on her first day of school. In honor of that little excitement, here they are together--egg and pleated school uniform skirt.

You raise chicks, build them a  coop, and then all of a sudden they actually lay eggs.  I know it is the most common of biological occurrences, but it still strikes me as improbable, and wonderful, and even miraculous.

Thank you, Esmeralda!

In May I left Lyanda and Claire and our new little chicks for a three week trip to Africa for work. A few days later (isn’t jet travel amazing?!) I found myself in a small stone-built compound in Mekele, Ethiopia, where Julia, the photographer I was traveling with, was documenting a peer-outreach worker’s weekly visit to an HIV-positive client.  The room where the client lived was very small, just enough space for a bed and a small stove to cook on, so I slipped into the courtyard to give them some space and to wait.

As I sat in the sun, two things caught my attention. There were half a dozen chickens roaming around, including this speckled gal of an unfamiliar breed, scratching and pecking in the dirt just next to me.  Handsome chicken! But even more compelling was the face of this older woman who had stepped out her door and was watching the commotion: white foreigners swinging expensive photo gear and taking photo after photo, the woman photographing her neighbor, and the man photographing her chickens! I took this snapshot of the scene, and began hoping I might find a way to take her portrait.

Biding my time, I noticed a small set of eggshells pressed into a little circle of earth above the door of her storage room. This was a keen anthropological observation, I decided; surely I’d found some ancient Ethiopian cultural practice, richly imbued with nature-magic and the potent symbolism of eggs and new life. If I could, I’d get the old woman to explain it, and thereby gain a deeper understanding of local Tigray cultural traditions.

As the photo shoot finished, I asked our translator to introduce me to the old woman. “Tell her I have chickens at home too,” I instructed, hoping our mutual fondness for poultry might open a door to asking more challenging questions about the folk traditions of local animal husbandry.

We shared a smile about our chickens-in-common. “And why are there eggshells above the door?” I asked, pointing across the courtyard. “What do they symbolize?” Her eyes followed my pointing finger, there was a rapid exchange in Tigrinya, and the old woman laughed, walked across the courtyard, talking all the way, and promptly reached up, pulled down the shells, and began crushing them between her fingers.

“What is she doing?!” I asked our translator with mild alarm, the Tigrinya speakers having forgotten that I no idea what was being said.

“They’re just eggs,” he replied, chuckling to himself as he negotiated the gulf between an inquisitive American guest with a chicken obsession and an old woman whose home we had invaded with Nikons and impertinent questions. I pressed him, “What do you mean?” as the old woman tossed the eggshells into a corner. They exchanged a few more words, and the symbolism of the eggs was revealed to be merely personal, not deeply cultural. When the chicks had been born, the old woman had stuck their eggshells above the door, in a small gesture of celebration. That was all.

The ice broken, I asked to take her portrait, and took what is one of my favorite images from the whole trip, with a bemused smile and an intriguing set of traditional tattoos. (See high-resolution versions of all these images, and a photo of the outside of the house, here).

As my colleagues said their thank yous and slipped out of the courtyard, I turned and took one last wide-angle shot of the scene. I hadn’t learned any secret Tigray chicken traditions, but I’d met a wonderful old Ethiopian woman, who was clearly fond of her brood.

Above are the two Barred Rock chicks, Esmeralda and Lucy, now nearly six weeks old, along with Chrysanthemum the Rhode Island Red.  As a discerning observer you may perhaps notice that Lucy’s comb looks awfully large and red for such a little girl.  You’d be right.  Lucy turned out to be a rooster, now re-named “Jehosephat” by Claire.  Roosters are illegal in the city, and Lucy/Jehosephat was relocated just this morning to her new home on the rural eastside.

When I started noticing Lucy’s impending rooster-ness, I added two tiny Buff Orpington chicks to our flock.  This is one of my favorite breeds, and I was glad to have space for them.  Here are Buttercup and Marigold, now three weeks old.

All the chicks have moved into the coop, but for now the young Buffs are kept separate in the Chicken Guantanamo area beneath the structure.  The older chicks still peck at them a lot, and they’re a bit small to hold their own.  The big girls sleep in the coop, and I bring the young ones in at night.

We love our coop, and so do the chicks.  Here’s Esmeralda in the chicken-door.

We’re slowly introducing the young Buff Orpingtons to the older girls.

We chose heritage breeds known both for their fine egg-laying and friendly, docile temperaments.  Now that the crazy rooster is gone, all our chicks are super-sweet.  I have every faith that they will soon live in chicken-harmony.

Why are we doing this?  See my recent post on city chicks and chickenomics…

Last summer we spent two months traveling in Kenya and Tanzania, spending a fair bit of time in small, off-the-track villages.  There, nearly everyone keeps chickens, which roam free in the dirt roads, alleys, fields, and schoolyards.  Most homes have a shelter for their chickens, with a roof and a nestbox, but the hens and chicks are never fed or locked away from predators.  They scratch for their sustenance and get by (or not) on their chicken-wits.

So it is with a measure of self-directed irony that I tell you we are raising our chicks in the kitchen, where I hover over them and cater do their every desire as if they were newborn humans.  There’s a lot of advice available on raising baby chicks and creating a good biddy box, which will provide all a young chick needs:  warmth, clean water, clean bedding, food, and space to run around.  Here’s our method–it’s simple, cheap (using stuff you probably have around the house), and works great.

We use a large plastic (Rubbermaid style) tub–110 quarts for 3-4 chicks. Yes, they are hunks of evil molded plastic, but they’re nice because they allow light in, keep the chicks from drafts, and you can watch the chicks through the sides.  They are also light and easy to move around, and they’re entirely re-usable.  Cover the bottom with two or three inches of white pine (or other white, non-cedar) shavings.  Cut a length of hardware cloth or “chicken wire” to cover the top of the box,  and overlap the sides by three or four inches.  Fold the edges over so the top fits tightly, and if the edges are sharp, trim them with wide tape.

For food and water you can use any dish or tray, but it is totally worth it to buy the little chick feeders and waterers at the feed store–they are just $2 each, attach to any mason jar, and will help keep the food and water clean and tidy.  When the chicks are several days old and starting to get taller, I put the water up on a half of a brick to help keep it from filling with shavings.  Just make sure everyone can still reach it.

For warmth, we just use an incandescent bulb in a flex-arm desk lamp. A 100 watt bulb will keep the temperature at 95-100 degrees F for the first week.  You’ll want to lower the temperature by 5 degrees/ week:   lift the bulb further away from the lid, or lower the wattage.  Tuck an inexpensive thermometer in the lighted area–I couldn’t find our chicken-house thermometer, so I’ve been using my instant-read bread thermometer, which works fine!  The chicks like to pick at it, of course.  Allow the chicks  some control over their thermoregulation–put the light in a corner so they can move in and out of the heat.

We put our biddy box in the bathtub at night, then we close the door so Delilah the cat doesn’t get any Terrible Ideas while we sleep.

When the girls are just a couple of weeks old, they’ll want to start roosting.  We’ll fix a branch to one corner of the box, so they can start playing Big Chicken.

That’s it!  When the chicks start to feather out, and if the weather is warm, this box can easily be carried outside for part of the day.  And when the chicks are ready to move into their permanent coop, you still have a nice functional box for, say, storing chicken feed, or for next year’s chicks!

Our new coop still looks like this. We'll finish it in the next week, before the little hens need it.

Chicks are available at most feed stores until mid-May (our local fave is The Grange Supply in Issaqhah–nice place, good folks, well-cared for chicks), after which chicks may not have enough time to grow large and strong before winter temperatures hit.  This means you still have a couple of weeks to get chicks, if that’s what you want, and work on the coop while they grow up in your kitchen.

A little encouragement:  People are sometimes worried about starting with chicks–they look so tiny and, well, ephemeral.  But they are strong, hearty little things.  If they come from a reputable source, you can have every reason to expect that they are healthy and will thrive.

Claire’s Prime Chick Advice:  “Cuddle them!”

For more information on urban chickens, take a look at Seattle Tilth’s FAQ, and their Poultry Resource List.

Also see my recent post on Why We’re Raising Chickens in the City!