My wife, Angie, has been doing these beautiful colored pencil chicken portraits over the past year or so. Now she’s chosen her five favorites and had them professionally printed as notecards.
We’re excited to offer sets of these chicken notecards (with matching envelopes) at TheGardenCoop.com. They make great gifts, thank yous, or notes for any occasion.
Hope you like them! Use discount code NEWCARDS for 10% off all our cards. Good through December 31, 2012.
The Portland non-profit Growing Gardens is raffling off a brand-new, fully built Garden Ark chicken coop. This mobile coop was lovingly put together by myself and the participants of a chicken coop building workshop I led for Growing Gardens earlier this year. We took great pride and care in building it, and if I may say so, it’s really a sweet little coop! (more…)
Reading Gail Damerow’s new book The Chicken Encyclopedia: An Illustrated Reference I was sent back to the time when my family and I were first looking into keeping backyard chickens. We’d found a handful of very helpful books on the subject. But something about the format of your standard chapter-by-chapter book left us feeling overwhelmed — like we had to understand the whole book, or we wouldn’t be prepared to get started.
The Chicken Encyclopedia is different. (more…)
If you frequent Coop Thoughts, chances are you caught this recent coop-building story by Morgan Emrich. I love his take on things, so I invited him to author a post about his experience keeping chickens. Here it is. . .
I would love to raise my kids on a farm. For a lot of reasons, that’s not going to happen. Like the majority of Americans I’m tethered to the city. But that doesn’t mean my children (9, 7, and 5 years old) can’t learn some of the lessons that farm kids take for granted.
Enter chickens.
Turns out a small flock of hens in the backyard can go a long way towards exposing children to things most city dwellers only get to read about in books. The concepts of natural cycles, environmental stewardship, biology, and our place in nature are no longer abstractions for my kids. Thanks to a small coop and a few chickens, these types of things have become concrete realities.
In particular, their feathered teachers have taught them five key lessons: (more…)
In case you’ve never happened on to it, John Henderson has curated one of the best lists of links to chicken forums, hatcheries, breed info, and resources for chicken health, care, and processing. It’s an excellent place for any small-flock chicken keeper to start.
Also included on his page are several links to early 20th-century books on chicken keeping, which make for fascinating reading. Everything old is new again, right? Bookmark Henderson’s Handy-Dandy Chicken Breed Chart as well for the next time you’re selecting chicks.
What can I say, I’ve always loved our chicken coop plans. But when I opened them recently on an iPad, well, I literally saw them in a whole new light.
The images are sharp and clear. The table of contents is clickable for easy navigation. You can zoom in and out on the diagrams and text. And you can perform all the page navigation gestures that are native to iBooks.
What’s more, you don’t need to download a special app (other than the free iBooks app) to be able to download, store, and view our coop plans — or any PDF file for that matter.
Just follow the simple instructions below, and have fun! (more…)
OMG. In case you were wondering just how extreme of conditions chickens can thrive in (with human help, of course), check out Lisa’s Garden Coop high in the mountains of Colorado. The rest of this post comes from her: (more…)
Our modern chicken coop designs have attracted the attention of the writers at The Well Daily, a website covering yoga, meditation, wellness, and nutrition. Check it out!
Note: The contest we ran with this post ended on April 2, 2011. Winning entries are noted below.
Think keeping backyard chickens is a little too old school? Here’s something that could change your mind.
The Pickin’ Chicken app for iOS lets you research and select breeds from your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch (Apple mobile devices only). Developed by Funny Farm Industries and released in partnership with Mother Earth News, it’s a high-tech complement to a distinctly low-tech hobby.
It not only looks really cool (then again, I think everything in iOS looks cool), it’s also got some cool stuff in it. (more…)
It’s spring again! And Karen in Connecticut writes:
We had a horrible winter here in Connecticut, but our chickens did very well. I wrapped the bottom part of the coop with heavy plastic to keep out the wind (suggested by you) and have just taken it off, as it us finally getting warmer. We are planning on adding on the exterior egg boxes this spring.
Thanks to Karen for sharing her photo. Like it? Check out her portrait photography.
Sometimes you just want the basics, some notes that can help you get from dreaming to doing. I put together this one-page handout for a chicken keeping presentation I gave last year, and I wanted to share it here as well.
It covers many of the most common questions about chickens and coop design like:
But mainly it gives you a bunch of little tips and reminders to help you get started with backyard chickens and with designing and building your own chicken coop. It’s perfect as a checklist to make sure you’re not forgetting anything important.
So if you’re keeping chickens for the first time, getting ready to build your own chicken coop, giving a presentation on chickens, hosting a coop tour, or trying to educate your neighbors about chickens — download our free sheet of chicken tips (8.5 x 11″, PDF), print it out, refer to it, and share it with others!
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In September, my son and I led a chicken coop building workshop put on by Growing Gardens of Portland. Twelve or so people came out to Naomi’s Organic Farm Supply to take part, I’m sure setting some kind of record for the most hands working on a chicken coop at once. We had a great day in the sun and put together an awesome coop. Read on for more details and pictures.
Chickens are extraordinary. Even the ordinary ones we keep in our backyard chicken coop and see around town — Rhode Island Reds, Barred Plymouth Rocks, Australorps, Americaunas. . .
But there are chickens, and then there are chickens. The latter you’ll find in this wall calendar, new for 2011.
Note: We don’t profit from links to Powells.com, but if you follow one and make a purchase, Powell’s will share a healthy portion of the sale price with Growing Gardens of Portland.
You’ve read the books. You’ve chosen your breeds. You’ve even cleared a spot in the yard for the chicken coop. And yet, something’s still missing.
Something feathery.
It’s okay. Look, you’ve already made it from the idea stage to the planning stage, and that’s quite a big leap. Now you just have to get from planning to doing.
Here are some tips for actually making it happen: (more…)
We had to move our “Green Machine” compost bin a few feet to make space for a garden path. When we pulled the black plastic shell away, we were treated to this, well. . . hmmm. The fluffy-white “frosting” is actually our family’s most plentiful carbonaceous material: shredded junk mail. Dig in!
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