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.

Peecyle directly or by peeing into a container you can carry outside and:

–Apply to soil or woodchips

–Add to your compost pile (pee helps leaves and woodchips to compost more quickly)

–DILUTE with 9 PARTS WATER to 1 part pee and pour around (not on) plants (distribute widely to prevent nitrogen burn).

Goodness, I hope my friends will still eat salad at our house after reading this!

For more information on the process and hygiene of peecycling, see Carol Steinfeld’s book, Liquid Gold:  The Lore and Logic of Using Urine to Grow Plants.

No matter what you think about peecycling, it’s time to reconsider our shockingly wasteful water treatment system.  Separating wastes and toilet paper at the source, rather than mixing them directly with clean water, makes good societal and ecological sense. The wonderful folks at Eco-Waters, a Massachusetts-based nonprofit, are exploring ways to incorporate source-separation, graywater use, and composting privies into our everyday lives. Steinfeld’s newest book, Reusing the Resource:  Adventures in Ecological Wastewater Recycling, available through the Eco-Waters website, is enlightening.

Meanwhile, the invitation to awareness offered by Pee-On-Earth day is a great place to start.

At dawn on the Solstice (also the anniversary of my wedding to Tom!), I will be, inshallah, climbing the ruins at Tikal, Guatemala with my family.  I promise I will not pee on the ancient, sacred ruins!  But I will be thinking of you all, and wishing you a beautiful Solstice in the spirit of another favorite William McDonough quote:  “Celebrate Fiercely.”

While perusing my trusty Maritime Northwest Garden Guide by Seattle Tilth, I found pod and snap peas listed in the “Sow Outdoors” list for July.  Planting peas in July?  I’d never heard of such a thing.  I called my various gardeny friends, including one of the editors of the Maritime Guide, and no one had ever tried it.  I had a few of my favorite Cascadia snap pea seeds left from the usual late-winter planting, so decided to give it a whirl.  The only space I had free in the garden was a narrow, and shaded in the afternoon, but I conjectured that since peas thrive in cool temperatures, that might work out.  By the end of August and through early September we had a beautiful little pea harvest.  It almost felt like cheating to be snapping crisp, luscious peas in the heat of late summer.

So this year I’m setting aside more seeds for a late-summer harvest–many garden shops and even catalogs quit offering peas much past May, so to do this we need to plan ahead. The common wisdom suggests planting peas in small trenches, and covering them as they grow.  I have never done this, and just plant them as I would a bean, about an inch down.  But last year I did finally start believing all the experts who said you should plant peas just one inch apart and not thin them.  That seems very close, and I always went for 2 inches, which seemed sensible, but the inch-apart pea planting brought forth the most lush, vibrant pea patch I’d ever had.

Happy Pea Season!

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.

Don't know about y'all, but I'm dreaming of summer. It helps to keep the summer garden in mind when doing the winter chores in the brown mud...

Last year we expanded our vegetable garden three-fold by converting grass into raised beds.  My plan for last autumn was to sheet mulch the last row of grass that receives any sun, making it ready for spring planting.  Sheet mulching is the  great, labor-saving method of converting any grassy-weedy area into a nutrient-rich garden bed by layering compostable material onto it, and letting it sit for several months.  It mimics natural systems, in which layers of leafy litter fall to the earth and compost over time, without tilling.  Many garden websites have instructions for sheet mulching–these from the New York Permaculture Exchange are pretty straightforward.  BUT of course I was too busy or lazy or something  last fall and didn’t get to the sheet mulching, which meant, yesterday, gathering my little Urban Land Army (Tom and Claire) and going at the sod with a shovel.

This is a controversial step–urban soil tends to be so distressed, removing the top layer of grass also removes any semblance of a soil ecosystem, and most permaculturists recommend mulching and planting over the grass.  But I am a little neurotic about grass removal.  In my experience, grass is SO tenacious–it starts growing back around the garden edges, and sprouting up between my carrots, no matter how much soil is piled on top of it.  It stresses me out.  As much as I agree with the permaculture philosophy, in my own yard (once the chance for sheet mulching has passed), I am a grass-remover-soil-amender, doing as much as I can to rebuild the soil after sod removal, with the help of chickens and compost and future good habits.  Besides, I like digging with my family…

The new bed isn’t that big–2 feet wide by maybe 20 feet long.  We removed as much of the wormy soil from the sod as we could, and put the rest in the chickens’ pen.  They were tickled, nibbling grass and finding worms all afternoon.  They’ll have it converted to fine, manure-rich soil in no time.

Meanwhile, my friend David, who works on making the waste products from the coffee industry available  to gardeners through his UpCycle Northwest project (and who I wrote about in the recent coffee chaff in the chicken coop post) was looking for gardeners to experiment with chaff and spent grounds as soil amendment, and burlap coffee bags as weed block/sheet mulch.  We said “Sure!” and he showed up yesterday like Santa Claus with a truck full of bags and chaff and coffee grounds. We wet down the new bed, layered it with the nitrogen-rich chaff and grounds, and–to speed composting for late spring planting– covered it with the burlap. I intend to amend the soil further with composted chicken manure from the coop.  We’ll soil test and see how it turns out.

David, spreading chaff.

The burlap coffee bags are beautiful, and I loved reading their stamped labels as we spread them–they came from Guatemala, Indonesia, Ethiopia, Mexico…David saves the ones with the cleanest, nicest labels for crafters, who repurpose them into handbags.  The rest are offered to gardeners, for whom they nicely replace that nasty plastic weekblock, and make the perfect first layer in a sheet mulch.  I am planning to plant this bed in a couple of months, so we will probably remove the burlap, rather than letting it fully compost, but I’ll try it as proper sheet mulch in the future, and will let you know how this experiment fares.

You’ll see there is some grass left, and if we lived somewhere that grass required upkeep, I would remove all of it.  But the rest of our grass is all in the shade, unsuitable for most food gardening.  We never water it, just let it die back in the summer, and it’s mostly moss (which is soft), and dandelions (which we and the hens can eat).  We use one corner to pitch our backyard camping tent in the summer, and a nice mossy spot for a quilt where we read and play games.  I am very pleased that, at least at this house, my grass removing days are complete!

For  information on obtaining burlap coffee bags, and more on upcycling, (the in-word for smarter/better recycling, making use of the energy in the initial production of something, rather than using more energy to break it down into raw materials–or, as David puts it, finding “the highest and best re-use for the material rather than the easiest or most obvious”), see David’s website, Seattle Burlap.

And for more on turning lawns into food, explore the wonderful Cascadia Food Not Lawns website!

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!

There are so many reasons to save seeds.  One is simply the placing of our lives within the cycle of nature, the completion of a circle from planting, to eating, and seeding again–to relish this lively, easy, sustenance from the land on which we live, even in urban places.  But there are other compelling reasons to save our own seed:  the control of our food supply apart from corporate interests; the preservation of biodiversity and heritage/heirloom varieties in our crops;  and the taking of a stand in support of farmers’ right to save seed.  Farmers have been improving their crops and preserving favored varieties by saving seed for millennia.  Today, five large, multinational corporations control 75% of global vegetable seed production, and the industry contrives at every turn to limit both the ability and the right of global farmers and gardeners to save their own seed through variety patenting, licensing agreements, and the development of “Terminator Technology” to render seeds sterile.  It’s completely–what’s the word?  Evil.

Seed-saving can seem daunting, what with jars and drying racks and silica packs, and  all manner of esoteric instructions.  Still, there are many simple ways to participate in the beautiful, global, grassroots movement to save seeds.  Our favorite is to save mainly the seeds that readily dry themselves.

We leave a batch of beans on the end-of-season vines until the husks brown and wrinkle, then collect the already-dried bean seeds within.  This is one of Claire’s autumn jobs, and she particularly loves to find the shining pink and black seeds in the pods that have collected on her Scarlet Runner Bean teepee.  Many flowers pods also dry themselves.  Claire collected the seeds from the marigolds in her edible-flower garden.  When the blooms are ready for dead-heading, the seeds are almost dry, and only need to be spread out for a day or two before storing in jars for spring planting.

One of the very best ways to save seed is to let the plants do it themselves.  Make sure to leave a green onion or two to flower and go to seed.  Unlike some invasive spreaders (like fennel) onions seeds don’t travel far, and will naturalize in the area you originally planted them.  Young sunflowers grow easily beneath their parents, and if you live in a temperate environment like we do in the Pacific Northwest, you can mulch these volunteers with straw for overwintering, and a healthy headstart on spring growth.  We’ve enjoyed watching a squirrel harvest the seeds from our mutant mammoth sunflower (by hanging upside down from the plant, of course), then earnestly plant them all over the garden, patting them down with his bad little squirrel feet.  If they grow, we’ll have a sunflower forest!

Tomatoes and squash can be left to compost in the winter soil.  Cover them with straw, and watch for the plants to emerge soon after the last frost.  Be sure and label the fruits you leave out so you know what’s growing.  Also be on the lookout for squash and gourds vining out of the compost heap!

For instructions on saving just about any kind of seed, check out the International Seed Saving Institute’s tutorial.

And when we don’t manage to save seeds, or when we want to try new varieties, there are so many lovely small companies that are working to preserve heirloom varieties, and farmers’ rights.  The Sustainable Seed Company is just one of the many seed sources that deserve out support, and they have a great, informative website.

Meanwhile, Happy Harvest.

]]> http://thetanglednest.com/2009/10/seed-saving-for-the-faint-of-heart/feed/ 2 http://thetanglednest.com/2009/10/oddball-eggs/ http://thetanglednest.com/2009/10/oddball-eggs/#comments Fri, 09 Oct 2009 03:44:52 +0000 lyanda http://thetanglednest.com/?p=1374 A guest post from my daughter Claire:

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.

I leaned over to gently unwrap the beans, and return them to the bamboo teepee I’d constructed for them and all their bean friends.  As I did, I had to reach across the sugar pumpkin plant that was sprawling across the base of both the beans and the sunflower.  I suddenly realized that I’d unwittingly created my own version of the classic Three Sisters guild.  Permaculturists suggest planting in communities, or guilds that build a sense of interconnectedness in the garden, moving us beyond the traditional limits of “vegetable gardening.”  The quintessential example of guild planting is the Three Sisters, the Native American triad of corn, beans, and squash.  The corn provides a trellis for the beans, the beans fix nitrogen for the other plants, and the squash, with its rambling ways and spreading leaves, creates a parasol for the soil, keeping it cool, moist, and alive.  I smiled at the little sugar pumpkin hidden in the leaves,  now just hinting at its autumn change from green to orange.  And of course I left the bean where it was.

I have tried growing corn in Seattle, and it always seems promising.  The plants are “knee high by the fourth of July,” grow tassels, and eventually ears.  But it takes a lot of space in a backyard garden, and the corn itself is always mealy; I’ve decided to give up and let the nice people on the sunny side of the state grow my corn, as they do so well, and are now selling at the farmer’s market in beautiful, affordable heaps.

So in my version of the Three Sisters, the sunflower stands as a substitute for the corn, and a very good one, I think.  It is certainly sturdy enough to hold its own against a vine.  And when the center opens to reveal its thousands of seeds, I’ll leave them for the birds.  I love this twining of food/beauty/human/wild.

I’ve plugged it before, and will again:  for the backyard permaculturist there is no better guide than Toby Hemenway’s Gaia’s Garden.

For a nice, kid-friendly introduction to a Three Sisters garden, check this site.

There are many myths surrounding the Three Sisters–here are just a couple.

We’d love to hear your ideas for other place-specific versions of the Three Sisters.