I’m a Pacific Northwest native and can’t imagine calling anywhere else home. However growing up, I spent several summers back on my mother’s family dairy farm in Missouri where I developed some pretty strong ‘rural roots’ as I call them. We got to raise baby chickens and heifers and swing from the rafters in the barn loft.
Food never tasted so good, and there was always good food to eat around there. If corn was on the menu for dinner, you picked it from the fields when you were bringing the cows in for the evening milking. It was a hoot and some of the fondest memories I have growing up.
So it’s not a surprise that Urban Farming became a passion of mine.
I always thought I would have 20 acres somewhere with a lot of elbowroom. I’d grow my own food, raise backyard chickens and have some milk cows or goats… it was a very romantic picture in my head. But life has a way of just moving on whether you’re ready or not, and sometimes you’ve landed whether you know it or not. I landed in the suburbs in the Greater Seattle Area. Suddenly I realized that there was no ‘family farm’ for my 2 kids to go back to and get that fabulous experience I had had when I grew up. So – I decided to bring the Country to the City. There wouldn’t be a barn loft to swing, but there certainly could be chickens!
It was important to me for my kids to have a different relationship with their food than a kid from the ‘Burbs’ would normally have then. I wanted them to understand that food doesn’t originally come in cardboard boxes or all covered in cellophane. I wanted them to see some life cycles and to know how animals could go beyond cats and dogs and how some can contribute to your dinner table. Besides – who can resist baby chicks?? I mean really – how adorable can you get?!
So we did our research and decided on the breeds that would be good for us – we were after medium layers, and anything but white eggs! So we head out to the feed store to get our baby chicks – it was quite funny when they kept asking me how many I wanted of a certain breed, and the answer was always, “One” – I was clearly going for the “Suburban Variety Pack”!
We finally ended up with:
- Golden Laced Wyandotte – Whoopi Goldbird
- Silver Laced Wyandotte — Silvia
- Black Australorp – Cluck Cluck
- Buff Orpington – Buttercup
- And two banties, Raisin and Peeper
They warned us that the bantams weren’t officially sexed, but they gave it their best shot. They were so cute – we took our chances! Unfortunately, they both ended up being roosters so one got to go live at a friend’s place out in the country when they started cock fighting. But Peeper was a keeper. He was a Silver Dutch Bantam Cock and quite the little ‘stud-muffin’. More about him later.
So with little chirping fluff balls, we headed home.
OK now what? What do we put them in?? I started thinking about how the feed store had those baby chicks; screened walls with a bottom… hmmmm, what can I make that out of… Then it dawned on me – this is exactly like a playpen! Off to Value Village and $4.00 later – I was set. Instant baby chick playground! It was great – the heat lamp could easily be suspended on the upper frame of the playpen and the mesh sides provided the much-needed viewing area. I quickly became known as the “Chicken Mama” and everyone wanted to come by to see the new chicks in the hood.
And they grew… and pretty soon they were outta the playpen and into a refrigerator box! I’m not kidding! I still needed to build a coop, but in the meantime, these chicks were going to call a cut-off refrigerator box in my garage, home. Our little feathered friends were truly ‘backyard chickens’ – they had the whole backyard to ‘free-range’ during the day. At night, they would line up at the sliding glass doors outside my studio just off the kitchen. They would wait for me to open the doors so they could trek across my studio, thru the laundry room, hop down the stairs into the garage and fly up to the rim of the refrigerator box, where they would all gather before hoping down one-by-one into the box to sleep for the night. This was way before YouTube or believe me, it would have just gone viral!
Now to build the coop!
What? Well, this refrigerator box wasn’t last forever and I needed a plan. I happened to be over visiting Grandma Ty, my neighbor, and mentioned my dilemma to her. She grabbed me by the hand and dragged me into the TV room where her husband Don, was watching the game and told me to tell him my story. Well it turns out that he was a recently retired engineer from a very well known construction company in the area. Apparently she was tired of him being ‘underfoot’ and welcomed the idea of him having something to do with his new found free time besides watching TV. I only had a rough little drawing on a yellow pad of paper to show him what I had in mind and a week later, he came back with a plan! And before you knew it, the red trucks started coming!
Seems that Don had a son and a lot of friends who all seemed to have red trucks and my driveway soon was full of them. They all came with power tools and air compressors and we were on our way! Within a short time, the ‘Chicken Condo’ was finished and my little backyard chicken flock moved into their new home.
Then I gave away the croquette set and built 4 raised garden beds in my front yard, but that’s another story.