Chicken coop design is the focus of today’s feature story over at Neighborhood Notes, a cool website focusing on hyper-local news in Portland. The Garden Coop is featured along with four other local designs. There’s a nice slideshow at the end with more pictures and ideas.
There’s a lot happening in Portland, for sure, and it’s nice to be included in such good company.
My kids will sit by the chicken coop for long stretches, watching in amazement as our chickens spy insects in the soil and snatch them perfectly with their beaks. Mysterious are the powers of the hen.
Such as this one: their ability to detect my slightest movements in the morning from the far corners of their chicken coop, clear across the yard, and through the double-paned glare of our sliding door. I know they see me, because they start that eager marching and chattering they always do when they sense food is imminent. It’s as though they have some superhuman motion-detection hardware installed in their head.
Well, as it turns out, they do.
Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis studying the eyes of chickens have discovered ”a masterpiece of biological design.” You can read about the research here.
Chickens’ superior color vision has something to do with never having spent any evolutionary time in the dark, whereas mammals were nocturnal for millions of years.
Night-vision relies on receptors called rods, which flourished in the mammalian eye during the time of the dinosaurs. Daytime vision relies on different receptors, known as cones, that are less advantageous when an organism is most active at night. Birds, now widely believed to be descendants of dinosaurs, never spent a similar period living mostly in darkness. As a result, birds have more types of cones than mammals.
It’s pretty interesting stuff. It might even explain the apparently hypnotic hold these birds have on my kids.
You’ve got to love haiku. They’re simple, elegant, and with a little direction, anyone can do them—kinda like our coops!
I’ve started a thread on our Facebook page (you don’t need an account to view it) where you can read and try your hand at chicken haiku poetry. (more…)
UPDATE: The Martha Stewart Show episode dedicated entirely to keeping backyard chickens has aired. You can see clips from the show including a look at Martha Stewart’s chicken coops at the link below.
Before you click over, remember to come back and check out our backyard chicken coop plans. With them, you can build a stunning walk-in chicken coop or mobile chicken tractor for (I can only imagine) a lot less than what Martha spent on hers.
Here’s the link to Martha’s chicken show (coop segment). It’s a great episode and well worth the watch, especially if you’re new to keeping chickens. Here’s the segment with Traci from MyPetChicken.com. Links to the remaining segments should be easy to find from there. Enjoy!
ORIGINAL POST: The Martha Stewart Show will be taping an episode on urban farming and chicken keeping in March 2010, and they’re looking for audience members. Here’s a bit of the email they sent me:
We’re filling our studio audience with individuals who raise livestock in urban environments as we celebrate the backyard farming movement. If you’re interested in attending this show, please be sure to tell us about yourself and your backyard farm, as well as why you’d like to be part of this special audience. Please feel free to spread the word and request tickets as soon as you can if you’re interested!
You can request tickets to The Martha Stewart Show here. The studio is in New York City, and there are FAQs about being an audience member here. It could be a good thing.
I came across this feature on keeping chickens in the city — it’s a 5-minute interview with an urban chicken keeper in England. I like watching pieces like this that give an honest glimpse into people’s food and lifestyle choices. This guy (er, bloke) may be on the other side of the planet, but it’s a small planet. His family, mine, and many others are keeping chickens for much the same reasons.
You’ll notice that his coop is one of those prefab Eglus. I like the modern style of those coops, and he’s integrated his well into his garden. (The cost of an Eglu is a different issue, and he talks about that in the video.)
Notice that he ended up building out his own covered run to increase his chooks’ space for ranging. It’s a good reminder that, even if you start off with an out-of-the-box chicken coop, some DIY skills will come in handy as you modify your coop to suit the needs of your flock and your space.
There’s a good post at UrbanChickens.net with resources for finding others in your area who are keeping chickens.
This was a necessity for us when we were just starting out. We’d read all the books. My wife even had experience with chickens on a farm as a kid. But until we met neighbors who were keeping chickens and found a group of locals online to turn to for answers, we stayed on the side of the pool.
Of course, having help and advice really comes in handy when you’re building your own coop. Whether you use plans or create your own design, being linked in can help you find deals on materials, get a helping hand or a work trade, and learn how to prepare your coop for your climate.
As with most things, the whole endeavor is just so much more fun when you’re doing it with others. So if you feel like you’re the only one in your area keeping chickens or wanting to keep chickens, put out some feelers. I bet you’ll find plenty of company.
I’ve heard chickens coo and seen them cope. I’ve even seen chicken cops. But when it comes to the structure in which chickens live, is it a chicken coup, coupe, or coop?
Well, it’s not a chicken coup unless you 1) built or got it through “a notable or successful stroke or move” or 2) ousted a leader from power and took it from him/her. Though I think if you pulled off the second, that would automatically qualify as the first too.
And it’s not a chicken coupe unless you’re talking about a two-door car. Which can happen. As can a chicken sedan.
So. . . by the process of elimination—and the power vested in my dictionary—chicken coop it is!
Or chicken house, chicken tractor, chicken ark. . .
Radio host David Miller (left) and me by The Garden Coop
This morning, I was excited to be a guest on OPB’s radio program Think Out Loud. The show today was about urban chickens, and online host David Miller came by with a remote unit to broadcast live from our backyard.
I think he was hoping to pick up on the mic some gentle clucking in the background. But as a testament to how quiet backyard hens actually are most of the time, the girls didn’t make a peep.
Three other Oregonians joined in as guests, and the conversation ranged from the legal (two nearby cities just declined ordinance changes that would have made keeping chickens possible/more possible) to the practical (health, cost, chicken safety) to the philosophical (what moves people to keep chickens in the city in the first place).
Several listeners called in and many more joined in the online discussion, and it left me with lots to think about. More on that in upcoming posts. It also left me grateful to live in a place where the law and the culture are accepting of keeping chickens. Thanks, Portland! And thanks to Julie Sabatier and OPB for putting together a great show.
You can listen to the program here.
P.S. David, you’re welcome back for eggs anytime.
I stopped in at People’s Food Co-op this weekend for a head of cabbage, some flour, a bag of. . . wait, you don’t care about that. On their rotating stand of wall calendars, this one jumped out at me. The back cover says it’s based on this book.
And here I thought our flock of standard laying breeds was fun to look at.
Note: We don’t profit from any of these links to Powells.com, but if you follow them and make a purchase, Powell’s will share a healthy portion of the sale price with Growing Gardens of Portland.
We’ve been beta-testing this audio-only version of our plan for The Garden Coop. Initial reviews from family and friends were positive, but since we’ve opened up the experiment to a general audience, it’s been met with, well—how else to put this—confusion. . .
You could listen to it on your iPeck!
Well, maybe it’s back to the sound board on this one. In the meantime, have a listen (it’s shorter than you might expect), and let us know what you think in the comments.
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