Keeping Chickens

The hubby and I are not "pet people". I don't like pet hair and chewed up things and picking up poop or scooping it out of a litter box. Luckily the hubby is so allergic to pets that when we lived in Baltimore we had a sitter that had pets and after she left our house he would have sneezing fits. Lucked out on that one.

But of course we have children (Ella especially!) that adore animals. After discussing chickens with a friend last spring (she has 12) I thought it would be a brilliant compromise- we get eggs, the kids get pets. Done. So on March 3rd we headed to the local feed shop and each picked out a different breed of chickens so we could tell them apart. Oh my, are chicks the cutest, most adorable animals EVER.

We kept them in a box in the laundry room under a heat lamp. They had to have a warm environment for the first several weeks and then we reduced the temperature by a few degrees every few days until they were used to room temperature. We got bigger containers as they got bigger, finally putting them in an old refridgerator box in the garage. We had to think fast though, they got big very fast and we didn't want to clip their wings to keep them from flying so we got into some funny situations. One day we had a tree stump grinder guy coming while we were frantically searching for one of the chickens. There were only 3 in the box. We looked and looked and were worried it had gotten out of the garage while the door was open. After an hour or so I looked over on one of the shelves and there she was, coiled up in our car cleaning basket on a shammy. About three months later I called the same guy and was trying to remind him who I was and where we lived and he asked me if I was the one who was looking for the lost chicken. That would be me.

Obviously the box was not going to work anymore so we researched building a coop. We had so many irons in the fire at the time though that we opted for outsourcing this part to a custom coop builder from Craigslist. We visited with him where the kids fell in love with his dwarf bunnies and 20 or so chickens (no this was not a rural part of town and yes I felt sorry for his neighbors. He had a rooster) and talked coop style. I'm a bit particular about coops. I don't want a mini barn. The coop turned out wonderfully and my husband designed and built the run and it really looks like it was built all at once. He's so handy. I stained it black so it wouldn't stand out in the yard.

The chickens are a lot of fun and are super low maintenance. How cool is it for the kids to go outside and gather eggs? It's so Little House on the Prairie, I love it. They are fun to watch, all of their scratching and pecking, and their eggs are delicious and so different from store bought eggs. The whites "stand up" and the yolks are so orange.

Once every 2 to 3 weeks I clean out the coop tray(an ingenious device-a wooden tray filled with wood chips sits underneath the chicken wire inside the coop. When they poop it goes into the tray and the tray slides out of a door for easy cleaning!). They require fresh water every other day and we fill their feeder every week or two. We feed them organic, vegetarian crumble from the feed store and they also free-range a bit. We have local predators like stray cats so the chickens can only be out roaming around when we are home.

We love having a bit of farm life in our backyard. The kids have their pet fix and we have our egg suppliers. Not a bad deal, right?

PS A few questions to answer: Yes, chickens can fly over a 5 to 6 foot fence if their wings are clipped. We've found one chicken on top of the coop and in the street as well. Oops! I'm going to drape bird netting over the bushes, fence and coop to keep the little bugger in. You can find bird netting in the gardening section of your local Home Depot. Also, we put a heat lamp in their coop since temperatures have fallen to the teens. We just used an indoor/outdoor extension cord and hung the heat lamp on a hook in the top corner of the coop.

If you have any more questions about keeping chickens in the Seattle area, check out Seattle Tilth's website. They even offer classes on bee keeping and container gardening!