Infographic time: the chicken coop checklist

Many thanks to Jason Macek for sending us a link to the great chicken coop checklist infographic linked below. Building your own coop? If you follow the advice below, you'll never find yourself saying, "wish I'd built it that way the first time." I like the encouragement to use the deep litter method, and plenty of warnings about predator-proofing. Can you find anything missing from the list?

Friday night thriller for the hen house

In honor of the spooky season so close in the rear view mirror (and my own recent viewing of Prometheus), here's a fun short, "Of Eggs and Aliens" that's sure to thrill the girls in your coop.

How many of us have road-side chickens?

I visited my parents new house in Seattle this weekend, and wouldn't you know it, a neighbor just two doors down from them has chickens!

How did I know he has chickens? Because he keeps his coop along the side of the house, just a few feet from the sidewalk. This isn't to say he doesn't have a backyard to keep them in. He does, but his girls are there for all the world to see and (like me) admire and wonder about.

side-yard coop in the Tangle Town neighborhood of Seattle

I snapped the picture above as I was returning from my morning run around Green Lake. You can clearly see the sidewalk to the right, and the tree-lined street is just a few feet beyand.  I couldn't help but smile as I saw these two chickens going about their morning scratching-and-pecking ritual there by the side of the road in full view of anyone walking or driving by.

It got me wondering how many others keep their girls on display for all the world to see? I suppose local zoning laws exert a lot of influence over exhibiting your chooks out in the open, but for those who can, do you? And if not, why not?

For the record, there's nothing in the regulations here in Redwood City to stop us from keeping urban chickens in the front yard. I just worry one of my egg-layers might wind up as dinner on someone else's table. We've got enough problems with raccoons, I don't want to have to worry about other invaders of the human kind.

Another beautifully sculptured urban chicken coop

I'm a sucker for creative, cleverly designed and aesthetically pleasing coops.

So when a friend sent a link to the nogg, I got all warm inside thinking how cool it would be to have this cedar coop placed in the corner of my yard. From their press kit:

The nogg is a modern chicken coop that has been designed in the shape of an egg. It has been designed to house from 2-4 chickens and is to encourage domestic farming while adding a touch of playful elegance to sit beautifully in any garden, urban or rural environment. The nogg is designed to enhance and compliment its surroundings and fit sculpturally with this aesthetic assumption.

In a sign of true chicken design pedigree, the nogg folks hail from the UK (just like the Omlet design folks did before them).

And in a sign of just how design-minded the nogg manufacturers are, you can download over 100Mb of high resolution pictures of the nogg "sculpture" (aka "coop-porn") from their one-page website. Tip: you can also see the same images in a much lighter weight PDF by downloading the press kit.

So here's to delightful coop design! Sing your praises to nogg folks on twitter @noggchickencoop

Black Friday Deals for Urban Chicken Lovers

Black Friday deals on urban chicken coops? Yes, indeed! If you've been sitting on the sidelines of the urban chicken movement waiting for an incentive to buy your coop and chicks in advance of the 2011 season, now's your chance.

• Omlet is having a Black Friday sale on all their Eglu coops, offering $200 off an Eglu Classic, $100 off an Eglu Cube and $50 off an Eglu Go. You'll recall that I got started with urban chickens thanks to an orange Eglu Classic, and I'm a huge fan of the design and simplicity of these robust plastic coops.
• MyPetChicken.com is offering $25 toward the 2011 chicks with the purchase of any coop (including their overstock coops on sale). They've also got all kinds of fun gifts for chicken lovers.

While most of us don't really start planning for next year's garden until the turn of the year, if you do a little planning ahead (like: now) you could save a lot of money on backyard-fresh eggs for next summer.

Happy Holidays to you!

DISCLOSURE: I don't receive any commission on any sales from Omlet or MyPetChicken, I'm just a huge fan of their businesses and all they've done to keep the urban chicken movement growing strong. Please support them this holiday season.

Secret Gardens of the East Bay Follow Up

I had the pleasure of talking all things urban chickens with a group of people who were participating in the 24th Annual Secret Gardens of the East Bay tour over in Oakland yesterday. It was a delightfully beautiful Spring day outside (sunny, mid-70s) and I was impressed that the group of about 30 or so people actually chose to cram into a small classroom to listen to me and ask good questions.

I promised I'd provide them links here on the blog to the urban chicken resources I listed in my blog, so without further ado, a shout out to the following people/places to get your urban chicken on:

• BackyardChickens.com - a strong online community of backyard chicken enthusiasts and just about any question you have about the cluckers, someone at BYC will know the answer.
• MyPetChicken.com - a wonderful online source for small quantities of just the breed of chicks you're looking for. They've got lots of other good chicken supplies and paraphernalia, too, and don't forget to consult their Chicken Selector Tool to help you narrow down your choice of chick!
• FeatherSite.com's Poultry Page - While it hasn't been updated in over a year, the content about chickens is timeless (and rest assured chickens haven't evolved enough in the meantime to warrant any updates).
• Yahoo! Groups related to chickens (like San Mateo Chickens and Silicon Valley Chickens)
• 4-H Clubs
• Meetups

And a big thank you to Nina for coordinating the speaker series and the gift of the awesome Slice of Organic Life book. I can't wait to put the ideas in the book to practice!

Finally, be sure to check out the Poulet Chalets article in yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle. It covers much the same information I did in my presentation (but it's in handy-dandy written form).

Urban Chickens and Conspicuous Consumption

The most often-asked question I hear from reporters or other curious folks is "how expensive is it to raise urban chickens?" My answer is always the same: it all depends on how much you want to spend on your coop.

The hens themselves are cheap, their food is cheap, straw/woodchips/water is cheap. The coop is ususally, decidedly not cheap.

And why is that? As long as our chickens have a dry, draft-free, safe place to sleep and a box to lay their eggs in (more for our convenience than theirs), they're fine.

We humans are the ones who insist on aesthetics. And the cost curve for aesthetics is steep as soon as you move away from the "homely, but it'll do" point and toward the "I'd be proud to show this off on a coop tour" end of the spectrum. So why bother?

The clue to this answer comes courtesy a blog post by Seth Godin (author of Linchpin, Tribes and the Dip, among others) where he revisits the notion of conspicuous consumption:

The reason you have a front lawn? It's a tradition. Lawns were invented as a way for the landed gentry to demonstrate that they could afford to waste land. By taking the land away from the grazing sheep, they were sending a message to their neighbors. We're rich, we can happily waste the opportunity to make a few bucks from our front lawn.

Which got me thinking about all the money I've spent over the years on landscaping for our homes as we've moved from one place to the next. I bought into the "tradition" each and every time by spending thousands to get a nice lawn and stately trees and perfect shrubbery.

Heck, when we first got into urban chickens, we bought an Eglu, which was definitely not the cheapest coop on the market (but I'd argue has been a great investment in terms of ease-of-cleaning).

But now that we have our chickens... I find I'm seeing the backyard lawn as the more wasteful use of money (ongoing thanks to watering, mowing, feeding, etc). And maybe that's the right way to be looking at things again.

How has owning chickens gotten you to re-evaluate your landscaping?

Photo credit: thomaspix on Fickr

The Hen Cam: Raising Urban Chickens Vicariously

If you are one of the unfortunate many who can't keep chickens on your own either because they are illegal or you don't have room or you simply don't have the time, there's still a way for you to get your urban chicken on! 

Enter The Hen Cam, an ingenious little website maintained by writer Terry Golson.

In addition to Golson's well-written HenBlog, the site provides us a view into life with chickens and goats on Little Pond Farm (which is actually just her backyard in a town west of Boston, Massachusetts).

She's got several cameras set up throughout her backyard taking pictures every 5 seconds and streaming them onto the web, allowing viewers to see snapshots from multiple viewpoints within the chicken's coop and run.

And if, like me, you wonder how the whole thing works, there's a detailed page on how the camera setup is configured so you can get your geek on.

If you look long enough (warning: it's mesmerizing), you can see all her birds: the Polish Cresteds, the Wyandotte, the Sussex, the Barred Rock (see her full list of animals here).

What I love about the HenCam is its aquarium-like quality: you get to see chickens being very chicken-like without going outdoors or influencing their behavior by standing outside their run or having to scrape your feet!

If you find yourself spending too much watching the Hen Cam, maybe it's a sign you need to get urban chickens of your own.

Urban Chicken Coop Tours in 2010

Spring is almost here!!! I've started to see news of urban chicken coop tours float through the internets, so I'm going to list those I know (and ask you to help me grow the list):

• April 3, 2010: Austin's Funky Chicken Coop Tour
• April 11, 2010: Pioneer Valley (Western Mass) Local Chicken Coop Tour
• April 18, 2010: Dallas, TX A Peep at the Coops tour  
• May 8, 2010: Bend Oregon's First Annual Chicken Coop Tour
• May 15, 2010: Raleigh's Hen-side the Beltline Tour d'Coop
• May 22, 2010: Davis (CA) Tour de Cluck
  
• June 6, 2010: Southern Illinois Coops du Jour
• June 27, 2010: Salt Lake City Tour de Coops
  
• July 10, 2010: Seattle Tilth's City Chickens Tour
• July 24, 2010: The Portland (Ore) Tour de Coops
• July 24, 2010: Everett, WA Coop Tour
• Sept 11, 2010: Los Angeles, CA (Westchester area) Cluck Trek
• October 30, 2010: McClellan, SC Eggstravaganza 

Cities where there were tours last year but I've not yet seen news about 2010: Albuquerque, Atlanta, Madison, Spokane, Tucson. As soon as I can confirm dates for this year, I'll add them to the list above.

As I said last year, Whether you're still at the planning stages of urban chicken farming or have had your own coop for years, going on chicken coop tour is a great way to see how others look after their chooks, get some inspiration for changes you might make to your own urban chicken setup or just meet your fellow backyard chicken fans on a beautiful day around the city.

If you know of a coop tour I've missed, please drop me a line or add it in the comments and I'll update this post to include it. Thanks, and have fun on your tours!

Photo credit: aehack on Flickr

how to add another chicken to your flock?

It's been almost a week since Sophia died, and I think ZsuZsu, the surviving chicken must be lonely out there (she's noisy every morning).

Surprisingly, I got the final results back from the necropsy performed by the CAHFS Lab already, and their conclusion as to why Sophia died? They don't know why (although they used more scientific terms than that). At the very least, we know she didn't die of any infectious disease thanks to their tests.

So, knowing we don't have something communicable in our remaining flock of one, we can think of building it up again. ZsuZsu is back to laying eggs again, and I'm anxious to get her a companion to share the Eglu out in the backyard.

As with all things chicken-related, I've been doing some research on the subject of adding a new chicken to the flock, and I gotta tell you: this isn't as easy as dropping another goldfish in the aquarium.

Among the finer points of "how to introduce the new bird" which present a challenge:

• To accommodate biosecurity concerns, we'll need to keep the new bird separated from ZsuZsu for anywhere from 2 weeks to 6 weeks depending on which resource you choose to heed. We certainly don't want to get ZsuZsu sick from a companion, no matter how lonely she is. Keeping them separated, however, presents a bit of a challenge in our backyard, and we'll need to get yet another temporary pen/house to do so.
• To accommodate behavioral concerns, we're going to need to find a way to provide room in the Eglu (run is 7'x3', coop is 2.5'x2.5') for the newbie to get away from ZsuZsu, or vice versa, while they establish the pecking order. While I'd love to think ZsuZsu is easy-going and will quickly warm up to whatever new bird we bring in, I also need to be prepared for them to not get along.

Most of the online resources I've read regarding adding a chicken to the flock are dealing with more than a one-on-one introduction, and obviously dealing with a coop bigger than our Eglu. So, as usual I'll be keeping you posted on our experience in our particular setup to add to the corpus of knowledge around raising urban chickens.

Talking things over with LeftCoastMom, we've agreed we don't want to start raising a week-old chick at this point of the year. I'm getting ready to do some pretty heavy travel in the next few months, and the room in which we raised Sophia and ZsuZsu two years ago has been converted into a painting/crafts room for our daughters.

So that leaves us to get a months-old pullet. I've found a local source, Ranch Hag Hens, from which to get the chicken (we'll decide on the breed from what they have available when we get there: either a Rhode Island or an Orpington or a Brahma). And they're not too far away, just 90 minutes north of us.

Now, before digging into the finer points of adding chickens to an existing flock, I'd thought I could take my daughters with me on the drive up and over the Golden Gate Bridge tomorrow to visit Ranch Hag Hens and pick out a new chicken.

It depends now on how much prep work I can get done today to set up a temporary new coop and run in the backyard today. Wish me luck.

"Vacancy" Photo Credit: Jeremy Brooks on Flickr

Bay Area chicken coop review

About two weeks ago, reporter Laura Casey came over to check out our chickens and talk with me about what it's like to raise urban chickens in the Bay Area.

Her article, Clucking about Backyard Chickens, made the Contra Costa Times yesterday. Ours is one of four backyard setups that's profiled in the piece.

It's nice to see the compare/contrast between different coop styles and how each of us got into urban chickens, but what I like most is Casey's quotes from each of us:

• "I haven't been this happy for a long time. I needed them. I just come outside and smile and when they jump in my lap. It's great."
• "I never expected them to be so entertaining and it never gets old. When I get an egg I am so excited."
• "I like my children to know that not all food comes from cardboard and Styrofoam boxes. It's not all about the bright-colored packaging and the songs." (mine)
  
• "My husband is an interesting fella and he has interesting tastes," Debbie Flinker says, "and he thought chickens would be fascinating pets. They are."

Paints a pretty wonderful picture about urban chickens, don't you think?

(BTW, happy Father's Day to all you dads out there)

a chicken coop from IKEA? YES!

While there's no specific product number for buying a coop from the IKEA catalog, with a little ingenuity, you can get just about everything you need from the Swedish Superstore.

The coop-construction details (finished product pictured to the right) are over on the IKEA Hacker blog, courtesy the experience of Aaron Bell and his wife Corinne's building their own.

The shopping list of IKEA parts is actually quite short (approx prices):
- Mydal bunk bed ($159)
- Trofast storage unit with shallow drawers ($95)
- Vika Oleby legs ($7.50 each)
- Gorm bottle rack ($8 each)

And the only non-IKEA parts they needed to supply were "the mesh, plywood/beams for the roof (which is 3x coated with reflective paint in an attempt to keep the heat out), and the hardware for the hinges and latches."

Now, that's what I call ingenuity! I wonder how long until the whole chicken coop kit can be purchased as one shrink-wrapped item replete with the adorable little illustrated instructions and hex key?

Thanks, Tamar, for the hat tip on this one!

an urban chicken farmer's first year

Found a delightful post over on the New Green blog that's a recap of the first year raising urban chickens in Brooklyn, NY.

The author's got an Eglu like we do, and she got her chicks from My Pet Chicken last summer, a resource I didn't know about two years ago when we got Sophia and ZsuZsu from Half Moon Bay Feed and Fuel.

In the span of a single (well-documented and -illustrated) post, we travel from "chicks arriving" to "first eggs" with great color commentary along the way.

I love how she ends her post:

We have enjoyed our chickens tremendously and highly recommend chicken keeping to almost anyone. We felt like first-time parents as we watched our chicks grow into hens. We love the rich, “meaty” eggs they give us. How many people have pets that make them breakfast?? What was really important to us was that our “city girl” daughter would grow up knowing where her food comes from, and now she does.

Let's hear it for urban chickens!

Design sources for urban chicken coops

Got an email from someone last night asking where he might get designs for building a coop in his backyard. I'm sharing my response here as I think there might be others asking the same thing.

There are lots of sources for coop design out there, depending on how handy you are with a hammer and nails and whether you need explicit step-by-step instructions or simply a book of inspirational pictures you can create your own plans from.

1. The Garden Coop -- Step-by-step detailed plans available for download. John Carr's put together a really useful design and done a great job making it accessible to those of us (like me) who have a lot of enthusiasm but not a lot of practice building structures.
2. BackyardChickens.com Coop Design Gallery -- An online gallery that displays the myriad types of coops owned by the community of backyard/urban chicken owners. The individual coops you'll see range from small to huge, from plain to fancy and from cheap to expensive. The amount of detail behind each coop varies. Some have dimensions and as-we-built-it photo documentation. Others are just the finished product.
3. Chicken Coops: 45 Building Plans for Housing Your Flock -- a book by Judy Pangman. The title's a bit misleading, but it's still chock full of ideas for coops for your chickens. Use this book more as inspiration for building your own coop, not for plans with a step-by-step guide to building a coop (like the Garden Coop's plans).

Are there other sources for coop design you'd recommend? How did you go about creating your own? Let us know in the comments!

Automatic urban chicken coop door opener

Mark Frauenfelder has a wonderful post up over on the Dinosaurs and Robots blog showing off the automatic chicken coop door opener he's created.




Frauenfelder's solved the problem of having to get up at the crack of dawn to let his anxious chooks out of the coop and into the run: the door operates on a timer that opens promptly at 6:30am to release the girls to go about their day in the run.

He's also got the timer set to close the door again at 9pm after the girls have gone to sleep. It's perfect for those of us who aren't close to home at dusk due to work or other activities.

Want to make one of these for your coop? The complete instructions (including diagrams and photos) are posted over on BuildEazy: Automatic Chicken House Door.

If necessity is the mother of invention, I think it's only a matter of time before someone creates an automatic egg butler that will collect eggs from the coop and bring them to your table, cooking them to order on the way.

Know of any other cool urban chicken technology? Share the lead and I'll write it up here in a future post with a hat-tip to you.

upcoming urban chicken coop tours

This past weekend's Funky Chicken Coop Tour in Austin is a good reminder to pull together a list of other chicken coop tours around the country this Spring.

The chicken coop tours I know of so far are:

• April 19: Pioneer Valley (Western Mass) Local Chicken Coop Tour
• April 25: Atlanta's Chicks in the City Tour
  
• May 16: Raleigh's Hen-side the Beltline Tour d'Coop
  
• May 23: Tucson City Chickens Coop Tour
  
• June 6: Spokane's Slow Food Spokane Coop Tour. Details via sfsr@gmail.com
• June 27: Salt Lake City Tour de Coops
  
• July 11: Seattle Tilth's City Chickens Tour
• July 25: The Portland (Ore) Tour de Coops

And tours that happened in 2008 but I don't yet see 2009 dates for include Albuquerque and Madison (Wisconsin).

Whether you're still at the planning stages of urban chicken farming or have had your own coop for years, going on chicken coop tour is a great way to see how others look after their chooks, get some inspiration for changes you might make to your own urban chicken setup or just meet your fellow backyard chicken fans on a beautiful day around the city.

If you know of a coop tour I've missed, please drop me a line or add it in the comments and I'll update this post to include it. Thanks, and have fun on your tours!

Introducing our April Sponsor: MyPetChicken.com

I'd like to thank this month's sponsor, MyPetChicken.com.

As you know from previous posts, I'm a big fan of the service that Derek and Traci are providing in equipping us small flock urban chicken farmers with chicks, coops, feed and all other manner of chicken-related stuff.

If you've been wanting to get started on your own flock, use the MPC chicken breed selection tool to figure out which breed is right for you and within days you'll have peepers at your doorstep.

I'm happy to host MPC here on the blog for the month of April, and I hope you let me know your experiences shopping with them.

so you want to build your own coop...

My good friend @badgerpendous has just posted his miscellaneous coop notes that's a nice list of "if I'd known beforehand, I would have..." items for all you newbie DIY coop-builders out there.

Once you get to his blog, you can see the rest of the coop updates to see how the process played out over time, but I really like the lessons-learned list.

See, before we got our own pre-fab plastic Eglu, I'd entertained the idea of building a coop from scratch. It didn't take me too long, however, to realize that the amount of time, tools and raw materials I'd have to buy would approach the cost of an Eglu, so I went the pre-fab route.

Without a lot of budget discipline, you can easily clear $400 building your own from scratch, not including the price of books to help you plan.

While there are a lot of great books out there with fabulous plans to use to build your own, I'm a man who knows my limitations. And the price I pay is to get some serious chicken coop envy when I see setups like that at badgerpendous or over on greenfrieda's blog. (sometimes I'll even window shop by searching on "chicken coop" on Flickr)

Edging away from building your own? If plastic's not your thing but you're looking for a high-end easy-to-assemble coop, you can also check out the offerings at Henspa.

Whatever you do, make sure your chickens get the right housing and you'll be rolling in eggs for a good long time!

starting out: a mixed breed urban chicken flock?

This week I got a nice email from Kate (she writes the great blog Gardening without Skills), and she's excitedly getting ready to bring a flock of urban chickens into her backyard this Spring. A friend of hers is building her a coop and she's raised ducks before, so she's got some familiarity with backyard fowl.

Her first question (among many) was whether or not she could mix chicks of several breeds in the same coop. Would they get along? Would she be better off getting three from the same breed?

I assured Kate it's very difficult to go wrong mixing and matching such a small quantity of chickens in your backyard. Chickens are very social animals and they'll get along fine. If you're getting your first flock, you'll want to get them all about the same age (ages should be within a week or so of each other). They'll figure things out themselves and establish a "pecking order" on their own.

While each individual chicken will have its own personality, there are breed characteristics that are for the most part dependable as you're picking out your birds. Keep in mind: humans have been breeding chickens for thousands of years to make them more domesticated and tranquil around each other. Consult the wonderful Henderson's Chicken Breed Chart for a comprehensive run-down of the various traits of any given breed.

And as far as getting smart about raising urban chickens in your backyard, it really is as easy as getting one of the many good beginner books and having at it. Chickens really are resilient animals and as long as you keep them in fresh food and water and clean the coop regularly, you're doing great!

Any other advice you'd offer Kate as she begins her adventure into urban chickens this spring?

a chicken's life inside the battery cage

The folks at Animal Visuals have put together an interactive media experience (embedded below) that allows you to see and hear what it's like to be a chicken in a battery cage. Mind you, this is the experience that 300 million egg-laying chickens are forced to endure here in the USA their entire lives.



See the Animal Visual page for the list of facts about battery farming or download the battery cage facts PDF here.

More than ever, I'm convinced we need to find a way to legalize urban chickens across the country to get our birds out of conditions such as this.