Day 13: City chickens

I’ve been following Gwen Bell’s Best of 2009 Blog Challenge since the beginning of the month. I’ve contemplated writing on some of the previous daily prompts, but today’s was the first to which I immediately had an answer.

The question: What’s the best change you made to the place that you live?

My answer: We got chickens.

We’d thought about getting chickens for a while. To be more accurate, I’d dreamed of having chickens. What I really wanted was to put our property – just over 1/8 acre in the middle of Seattle – to work producing food for us. Originally, I imagined a vegetable garden, and perhaps a few fruit trees. Then I took a good look at our yard, and found that it was, well, shady. While sun-loving veggies and fruit might not thrive, chickens could do well in shade. Over several months, I gradually brought Paul around to the idea that a small back yard flock – and the freshest organic eggs – would be a good idea.

In March, we picked up five 2-day-old balls of fluff, part of my friend Laura’s 100-chick order. (Click on the link to hear the delightful cacophony of 100 newborn chicks peeping.) We brought our little ones home in a shoebox, and ensconced them in an appliance-sized cardboard box in our basement, where we could keep them warm until they were fully feathered and old enough to move outside.

Before the chicks could move out of the basement, they needed a coop. We bought (very good) plans over the internets, and built a coop. This was the first substantial construction project that Paul and I had ever tackled together; it’s not surprising that we didn’t approach things exactly the same way. There was some friction, but eventually we completed construction. In June we moved the girls into their back yard home.

Just a month and a half later, we got our first eggs. So exciting! So delicious! So small. (This is typical when chickens start laying.) In the several months since then, the girls have given us dozens of eggs, and there will be many more to come next spring and summer. As well as eggs, our chickens provide other pleasures. They are beautiful, curious and endlessly entertaining… but I’ll have to tell you more about that another day.

This is Louisa, one of our two silver-laced Wyandotte pullets, in one of the coop’s nesting boxes. This time of year, the girls aren’t laying much, but they seem to like hanging out in the nesting boxes anyway.