Urban Chickens Are Taking Over Oak-Town

As we finish packing up to move, I've noticed that the item we own most inquired about by friends and neighbors are our five chickens. Rosie, Clementine, Crystal, Snowflake and Isabelle have absolutely no idea how popular they are. They even were requested at our moving\garage sale even when not present!

Increasingly people are seeking (in Oakland and elsewhere) to adopt chickens as pets, egg-producers and garden-enhancers. We got hot on the idea after reading foodie-fun and world-revolutionary-through-daily-action-books such as Omniovre's Dilemma and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. In our neighborhood the chicken owners all know who each other are. The eggs are fantastic: much better than cheaper industrialized pseudo-farming ones. I've noticed a large increase in wildlife attracted to our yard since the girls moved in. Plus the manure|compost is awesome. Rosie, one of our five, actually acts like a dog, running up to me and following me at my heels as I walk around the yard. Here's some pictures of our coop.









Urban chickens are also in the news. Last week a video segment on NYC coops ran on Nightline, a large article in the Oakland Tribune. There's even an "urban chicken" group on facebook, based off the blog urbanchickens.net. I myself like mypetchicken.com. They take up little space - they actually are content to dig, scratch, dirt-bath and eat - eat - eat - did I say eat? - in appropriately sized urban spaces. I find in the inner East Bay that Mike's Feed in San Leandro has a good array of food, supplies and even coops for sale. Urbanchickens.net posted about a coop made from Ikea products this week, if you're looking for inspiration.

Urban Chicken Farming

In the past year we've taken in 5 chickens (the girls as well call them) that supply us with more than a dozen eggs a week, loads of nutrient rich manure for organic composting in our yard, and lot's of laughs. They're actually quite easy to take care of. Of course, we're still working out once happens when they're too old to continue producing eggs. Once we got chickens we started discovering chickens all over the place here in Oakland, from nearby neighbors to friends.

A great article appeared in Newsweek this week "The Craze for Urban Chicken Farming"

Some great online sites about chicken farming (at least among my favorites) include:

mypetchicken.com
barnyardchickens.com
urbanchickens (blog)

Enjoying My Summer Garden

& Looking towards the Fall

My tomato crop is beginning and will shortly inundate us. I plant a lot of them, mostly heirloom (11 plants this year) as they're so good fresh from the garden and quickly get so pricey at the farmers' markets. Here's a picture of some of the food I harvested & we enjoyed in our garden this past week.

10 tomatoes
Lot's of herbs: basil, parsley, sorrel & cilantro
about 2 pounds of green beans
2 dozen eggs (from our chickens)
apricots (frozen from late-June/early-July)
about 1/2 lb of blackberries

Our next round in the garden includes:
squash
pumpkins
sunflowers
more tomatoes & green beans

A friend asked what they should be planting in terms of preparing a fall/winter garden. I've planted broccoli & leeks so far. The lettuce I did was fried in the heat of the afternoon sun. Here's other stuff you can be planting now as the heat of the summer cools to fall:
lettuces, aragula, other greens
Kale
Brussel Sprouts
Carrots
Spinach
Herbs from seeds (I still can make them happen through October)
Cauliflower
Chard
Garlic
Onions

Here's a helpful site with a more extensive list, including planting dates & suggestions. (Master Gardeners of Santa Clara County)

Here's a great article on "growing your own greens" from Sunset.com.

If you're doing an edible garden to reduce your carbon footprint, eat local, be victorious or just to have fun, what are you planting? Do you have any tips or suggestions?

20 Minutes to Save the World
The Story of Stuff

A friend passed on this great video (worth spending 20 minutes learning with) about where all our stuff comes from and how we are not only prisoner to our possessions, but enslaving our planet and earth resources to be so.
GREAT STUFF!

http://storyofstuff.org

Il Faut Cultiver Son Jardin
reducing my footprint one day at a time

I've been working and wondering recently a lot about how I live my life, seeking as one friend calls it "to go off the grid" in order to become more self-reliant, earthy-friendly, less consumeristic, and leave a smaller carbon footprint as I seek to follow Jesus as spiritual guide in my life. So I've decided to take up a weekly blogpost on my efforts ranging from organic gardening to supplement (and maybe primarily produce?) our family's green intake, raising egg-laying chickens in an urban context, reflecting on the integration of faith and ecology, and seeking to raise our children to be more about cultivation than consumption.

I'm calling this weekly blog-post "Il faut cultiver son jardin." The phrase is the concluding word and principal theme of Voltaire's short novel Candide. In English we'd say "One has to take care of one's garden," the notion that life is about cultivation, growth, maturation, discovery and life-living. It's an a propos title for my emerging thoughts on this.

I read a great article in today's SF GATE "Quest for Cutlural Oasis: Standford professor finds hope that consumerism won't render caretaking obsolete" by Susan Fornoff detailing the book "Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition" by Robert Pogue Harrison. It all makes you wonder. We live in a culture that's so quick to replace something old with something new. Don't cultivate, encourage growth or transformation of anything we already have...rather just buy something new. Replace don't reuse. Isn't it ironic that when an appliance breaks it's almost always cheaper to buy a new one then to have the old one fixed? We are being spoon-fed a culture or impotence, where we have to have the latest thing we see on tv, on the internet or on the side of a passing bus. Bigger is oftentimes better. And we don't have to always being upgrading to have it. We seem to place our optism on future products that can be made for even less money in the 2/3rds world. Where is our hope beyond in the next season of clothes, generation of cell phones, and next cd? Maybe that's what Voltaire was on to. I myself am a freak in the sense that I feel this deep "have to" urgency to make purchases when items are really reduced and cheap, like I can't miss out on the deal so I overbuy instead of using what I have. I'm a sucker for our modern advertising powers. Undoubtedly I'm not alone. No wonder our carbon footprints are so big. We're always buying bigger and better shoes.