Having only recently outmatched the local pests that have been undermining our food growing, I hate the idea that our chickens might pick up where the varmints left off and fill that undesirable niche.  They have an appetite for edibles, or at least a willingness to trample our garden in pursuit of something worth a peck.

We have vegetables planted in numerous beds throughout our property, so fencing out the chickens is not practical, as it wasn’t with the squirrels and rabbits.  The best option looks to be fencing our pullets in — at least until we harvest the warm-season crop — and limiting their range to the compost hills and piles of deadfall under our Silk Oak, where they tend to spend the greater part of their day, anyway.  This will still provide them a good-size area in which to frolic all chicken-like.  Confinement, in industrial agricultural terms, it is not.  While 97 percent of egg-laying hens find themselves limited to a mere 67 square inches of “personal” space, our four chickens’ reduced range will afford them more than 6,700 square inches apiece — a hundred times the industry standard, but still much less than the 117,000 inches they get when the whole yard is their playground.  By next summer, we will likely install a fence between our upper a lower yard, leaving the chickens with a large run, while protecting the edibles.

Before erecting a fence around their new, limited range, I tried shaming them with a stern lecture and grounding them in the coop for several days.  They responded by thrashing their cage, breaking an egg, and not laying on the third day of their restriction.  So, yesterday, up went the fence, which they seem happy with, though it only took 12 hours for them to demonstrate that the three-foot fence couldn’t hold them.  It’s now at 4.5 feet.  Another foot is about all I can easily do with the materials I have handy.

Hopefully they’re pacing the fence in search of bugs and seeds, rather than weak links.

Egg salad and fried egg sandwiches, brownies, several batches of chocolate chip cookies, and lots of pancakes: Since our chickens started laying on June 28, we have collected 37 eggs — and for the last 11 days straight we’ve gotten at least two each day.

It took a few weeks of fits and starts for the laying to become regular, and I don’t know when we might expect to start getting an egg a day from each of our four chickens (I think it took Bailey, our Rhode Island Red and first layer at least two weeks to become consistent). There was a stretch of five days in early July when our chickens laid no eggs that coincided with the first days of letting them range, so we kept them in the coop until we could determine that our pullets weren’t secreting eggs throughout the yard (They’ve only done this with one egg, left just outside the entrance to the coop).

But, despite not being up to full production, what we do get keeps us in eggs — excellent eggs.  What I initially took for tiny practice eggs turned out to be just eggs — our chickens lay in several sizes, from a tiny, just bigger than an olive variety, to the large eggs typical of a supermarket (though these arrive less often, and occasionally double yolked).  The eggs come in various shades of tan-brown.  Regardless of size, the quality is high, with firm, vibrant yellow-orange yolks so potent they color the pancakes we cook.  Definitely Grade AAA, a ranking that has little to do with size, though I always thought it did since at the market it seems to correspond with gargantuan eggs.

The biggest difference between our homegrown eggs and the store-bought kind is in shell strength: It takes a good, forceful smack to crack them enough to pry open.  This quality is essential since our birds continue to empty their nest boxes of all bedding so that they lay on bare wood.  The eggs end up dropping several inches and hit hard — but they all end up whole.  We’ve only lost one egg this past month, a large one I suspect Kate (the Dominique) of pecking open and eating.

The upkeep for our flock has become a bit more sustainable as the ranging allows much of their diet to come from the yard.  I’ve noticed a 25 percent reduction in their feed consumption … so in just four months the chickens have been able to meet and surpass my own eating-from-the-yard objective.  Perhaps we should consider bugs and grass as a bridge to 15 percent of our annual calories.  Perhaps.  Another perk to the free-ranging pecking is that the chickens take their waste with them and distribute it as fertilizer throughout the yard (and less beneficially on the porch), rather than concentrating it all in their coop, which means fewer cleanings.  And we get these funny personalities clucking around.

Lots of positives, but most of all good eggs, made fresh daily 50 feet out the back door.

Despite industrial agriculture’s co-opting and subsequent diminishing of the descriptor “free range”, it is rewarding to be able to describe our chickens as such and mean it.  They aren’t limited to a euphemistic “access to the outdoors” — typically a meager chicken run meeting the minimum USDA standard and meant to dupe consumers.  Our pullets can roam where they choose in our yard, eat what they like, and defend themselves (or not) as needed from the wild animals that share their space.

They can be chickens, every day.

So far, they use their new-found liberty to scratch and peck from morning to evening in an unrelenting march about the yard.  They are particularly fond of the compost piles, perhaps having longed for these stacks of edible refuse that sat just out of reach for as long as they can remember.  They spend half their time there, as I’d hoped, fertilizing and turning the piles in exchange for the bugs and scraps they get to eat.

Bailey (Rhode Island Red), Seven (Barred Rock), and Justin (Buff Orpington) cruise together, with Kate (Dominique) almost always on her own.  It’s not clear by whose design this is, but I find it hard to believe either party would exclude the other as a result of Kate being added to the flock a week after the others.  She is also one week younger.  But the disconnect is hard to disregard.  At least they get along like acquaintances, if not sisters.

In exploring the yard, they’ll peck anything once: grass, sandal, flower, cement.  They don’t seem opposed to eating the spiny, mature growth on our squash plants, unfortunately, so they’ll have to be kept away from most of the vegetables, even if they do ultimately turn havoc in the garden into eggs.  Their powerful scratching — the yard at the end of the first day of ranging looked like it had been hit by a hundred tiny tornadoes — also poses a problem for delicate or shallow-rooted plants, as many edibles are.

However, we could hardly confine them any longer.  Though our coop is sized with the requisite four square feet of floor space and 10 inches of roost per bird, we would have built it bigger if our intent was to always keep them in.  As it was clear when they needed to move from the brooder to the coop at six weeks, it was clear they needed to range at 20.  They’re big, and they look bigger, more real for some reason as they trot, scratch, and peck across our view out the back door, and add their clucks to our morning breakfast — providing a novel, yet natural backdrop to our every day.

With just two weeks to go before, by most measures, the egg laying should commence, our four chickens have become decidedly anti-nesting in their dispositions.  At 18 weeks they are full grown, combs and all.  They just don’t seem to possess a nesting bone between them.

I have been waiting expectantly for some sign that their nesting instincts have kicked in — assuming that this set of behaviors will precede the first eggs dropping.  But these pullets appear to be going their own way, perhaps staging a quite impractical rebellion.  Maybe I’m associating these chickens too closely with my wife when she was near-term and nursery focused, but doesn’t the description of a pregnant woman having a “nesting instinct” originate with chickens?

Not with our chickens, at least.  If my wife had followed their example, our month-old daughter might still be sleeping on the floor of an empty room.

Each week — but particularly these past few as the time to eggs has grown close — I end my coop cleaning by carefully repacking each nest box with straw, ensuring a soft landing for anything laid.  And each week our chickens pick and scratch every shred of it out of the boxes and onto the coop floor.  Within minutes.  Justin, the yellow Buff Orpington, is always the first to redistribute the nests I’ve carefully constructed.

It would be one thing if they were relocating the nests to another part of the enclosure, knowing better than I where they’d prefer to lay.  But repurposing the provided nesting materials doesn’t seem to be their aim.

I built their nest boxes according to the characteristics and specifications about which I read: at least 14 inches square with one open side, located in a dim, high, and secure location.  While the books recommend one box for every four or five hens, these girls have their choice of three (though they’re likely to choose the one they all snuggled in when they were first transferred to the coop).

Maybe our chickens are just immature.  By my count they have two weeks to 20 — two weeks to sync their bodies and minds before we have eggs who knows where and in what condition.

At 10 weeks old our chickens are very chicken-y.  Which I guess is what you hope for with chickens.

They have become foot-tall, four-pound birds with vibrant colors and sleek feathers.

Yet, despite their appearance, they still have some growing into themselves to do.  They all have lingering tufts of fuzz here and there that have yet to feather out, their combs and wattles are immature, and they still peep between clucks like a teenage boy trying to find his voice.  But from a distance, they’re chickens.

And no inadvertent roosters … so far.  Pullets all.

Since they moved from the brooder to the coop a month ago, there’s been little to do but watch their rapid growth.  Besides peeking at their food and water each day to check for mishaps, there’s no need for frequent refills — and certainly not the daily (or three-times daily) restocking that marked the last week or so indoors.  The outdoor feeder holds 10 pounds of food, which lasts about two weeks (for now), and it hangs from a hook at bird-breast height so it can’t be tipped or fouled.  I originally had a 2-gallon water can hanging as well, but the girls quickly found a way to unbalance it so that the tipped bowl would leak till empty.  The can now sits on a pair of bricks.  It doesn’t keep clean nearly as well as the food can and needs to be swished out every few days as the chickens sully the water with their dirty beaks.

Ensuring a potable water supply and a once-weekly coop cleaning are about it for regular maintenance.  The open design and dirt floor make upkeep easy.  For us, it’s a few-minutes chore.  Most of the coop can be hosed clean from outside.  And the dirt floor soaks up the mess as I’d hoped.

So far, the coop remains secure.  It’s hard to say what goes on at night, but it appears as though the chickens have not attracted any committed predators.  Perhaps that will come with the eggs.  One morning I did find a hawk perched in the mulberry above, intently observing.  But there’s been no burglary, even when invited.  A few days ago I discovered that at the last cleaning I’d left the main coop door not only unlocked, but unlatched for two days.  A strong breeze could have opened it.  Luckily, nothing entered — or exited.

I am surprised none of the chickens made a getaway since they are pretty interested in what goes on outside the chicken wire.  Justin (the Buff Orpington, yellow) has made the only successful leap to freedom, sneaking out behind the watering can as I removed it for a cleaning a week or so ago.  She didn’t get more than a few feet before she stalled in contented earth scratching.  They’ll be big enough to range when they’re big enough to lay.

Wanderlust aside, the chickens seem pretty satisfied with their coop — and each other.  So far they’re pretty egalitarian and haven’t once mentioned anything about the shared feed being socialist or groused that my cleaning represents an unnecessary intrusion into their rights to maintain their own cage — or not maintain it.  Neither do they appear to be locked in an epic struggle to determine a pecking order (though what I’ve read suggests this should have been determined by now), and instead seem to be content to live without class divisions.  And they have never once tried to exclude us from their coop just because we don’t look like the chickens they’re used to.

They like us just fine.  Particularly Seven, the Barred Rock (big, black and white), who is shaping up to be a people bird.

We’re looking forward to the first eggs around July 7.

I had originally intended to wait a few more days before transferring the chicks to the coop, but the weather’s been warm — and I just couldn’t take any more attitude.  Those little birds have been wearing me down.

Over the past week the chicks have gone wild, turning from adorable little tufts of fuzz to brooder ransacking hooligans.  They began dumping their feeder a half dozen times a day, or packing it with bedding, or burying it at the bottom of the brooder under several inches of wood shavings.  In all cases, food was wasted at a fast pace and hungry, expectant peeping ensued.  They also began kicking bedding into their water bowl so thoroughly that it would absorb, thicken, and block their access to needed fluids.  Their kicking and digging and scratching had become an unyielding cacophony at all hours, an activity that flung bedding across the garage and stirred plumes of pulverized dust and food into the air to settle on all surfaces.  And they’d begun to smell, no matter how often their cage was tidied.

If our relationship was to have any hope of a rosy future, one of us had to move out.

At five weeks old, they’re at the right age to be transferred to an outdoor coop.  At this point, all but Kate are fully feathered (she’s a few days younger) — and they’re all strong, with tough claws and sharp beaks.  As the weather has warmed, I have barely used the heat lamp.  They’re ready.

This past week I gave the coop a smell test, of sorts, by placing wet and dry cat food in the coop in the evenings to attract varmints and test their mettle.  Nothing got in, but nothing big really tried.  Some animal attempted to dig in around the edges in several places, but stopped at the buried bougainvillea in each case.

Hopefully the coop is secure.

Either way, the chicks are out there.  Their initial explorations were hesitant and en masse, but eventually they discovered their water, food, and independence, and with some prompting surveyed the inner coop and nest boxes. Late their first night (just moments ago), I found them huddled under the lamp, sleeping comfortably.

We have a coop with chickens in it — in our yard.  How about that.

For weeks — even before our shipment of chicks arrived — I have been reading about the perils of being a chicken.  And there are many.  However, our brood will not face most of the horrors about which I have lately learned simply because of its size.  As with any animal, high population density encourages health and social/behavioral problems.  It’s true for people.  It’s true for chickens.

So our chickens are unlikely to suffer from Marek’s Disease (though we got them vaccinated just in case), or any number of other ailments that chickens kept by the thousands in industrial feed houses suffer from and that necessitate their daily doses of medication.  Our chickens are unlikely to cannibalize one another, or gang up on and peck a smaller chicken to death, or isolate a disliked chicken and prevent it from feeding until it starves to death — as happens with chickens that are not provided adequate personal space.  It’s extremely unlikely that they will peck each other till they bleed out of boredom, as birds in featureless environments where they can’t range around and scratch for part of their meal tend to do.

However, one threat we cannot control is the behavior of other predators that like to eat chicken and eggs as much as we do.  Absent an indiscriminate aerial bombardment of our neighborhood with pesticides and herbicides that would make Rachel Carson blanch, there will be predators and they will try to eat our chickens.  The prime candidates in our area are hawks, skunks, opossums, raccoons, and coyotes (though I’m not convinced the latter can get into our yard).

Our chickens will range during the day when the hawks are out, and we have done what we can to give the chickens a fighting chance by ordering breeds that will blend in with our environment and that are fairly alert and self-sufficient.  We are also growing flower beds and other cover that the birds can hide out in when something’s overhead.

The real threat will come at night according to the troubling anecdotes I’ve heard from local keepers and from the warnings I’ve read: raccoons that will pull a chicken’s leg through the chicken wire and bite it off, raccoons that can figure out latches and locks, opossums that dig their way into the coop to eat the abdomen out of a chicken and leave the rest, and skunks that tunnel in, too, and eat the heads.

Such tales have already had me modifying the coop.  I offset a second layer of chicken wire around the entire structure to a height of two feet to prevent reaching in.  I complicated the latches and locks (but I’ll probably test this measure out on my neighbor’s kid, because if a toddler can figure it out, a raccoon can).  I buried layers of dried out, razor sharp bougainvillea stalks to eight inches deep around the coop borders.  And I am planting defensively, installing thorny berry vines and pineapple plants along the exposed lengths of the hen house.

But will it be enough?  There’s really no way to know until it’s not.

Because we’re not varmint exterminators, nor insect or weed eradicators, and because we try to live a more permaculturally-minded existence, we feel we also have to be realistic about our chickens and their survivability.  We have always wanted three chickens.  Two would be too few.  And it seems like a distinct possibility that we’ll lose at least one to the success of some hunting animal that earned it.

So, long story long — we got ourselves another chick.  We bought a week-or-so-old Dominique from Kahoots on Monday, so she’s about the same age as our brood.  We were pleased to see the other birds signal their acceptance of the little Dominique by cleaning her off upon her arrival.  Our birds have grown fast in the last two weeks, sprouting feathers almost immediately, making short flights at 10 days, roosting.  They’re friendly with us at this point, and will sit in our hands or perch on our fingertips without trying to escape.

And they’ve all got names now, too: Bailey (Rhode Island Red, reddish), Justin (Buff Orpington, yellow), Seven (Barred Rock, black and yellow/white), and Kate (Dominique, smallish black).

We’d hate to lose any of them.

Over the past few days I, and my friends Paul and Charles, built a green-roof chicken coop in preparation for the chicken raising that will be going on in my yard this spring.  I’ll be ordering three or four day-old chicks when they become available in February.  We can hardly wait.

I researched and designed the coop months ago, but had been waiting for classes to let out for winter break to build, then for the holidays to pass.  This left me nothing to do but pour over the designs again and again, staring at them with nothing left to tweak as a poor substitute for construction.  (I have included the plans and materials list I used to build the coop — construction documents they are not, as my wife, skilled in AutoCAD, noted.  I am happy to explain the plans to anyone looking to build from or modify this design.  She has promised to render the plans in AutoCAD for a future post.)

Researching green roof construction proved interesting.  There seems to be some consensus on the layers required to make a functional living roof, but a lot of variation exists in the materials used.  Beyond ensuring the structure can hold the added weight of wet soil and biomass, the concern turns to moisture control and drainage — keeping the water off the wood.  This is where the layers come in.  I started by covering the plywood with 3M Flashing Tape, then covered that with this sticky, tar-backed U.S. Seal Instant Waterproof Tape.  For drainage, I used a Tuftex PVC Panel, which is ribbed and will direct excess water off the roof.  It will also serve as a root barrier keeping the plants from burrowing into the wood.  Atop this I placed two layers of burlap to keep the soil from sloughing off down the drainage channels: Water can easily penetrate this layer, so the plants won’t drown, but the soil should mostly stay in place.

All that’s left is planting.

We chose to incorporate a living roof into the design because it gets so hot here in the summer, and the insulating properties of the roof will help keep our chickens cool.  And it’s more space to grow edibles — for us and the chickens.

The coop took one full day of prep (buying materials, cutting, staining), one full day of building (framing, siding, chicken wire), and a half day of tinkering and fine tuning (hinges, latches, nest boxes, green-roof layers).  Definitely a three-person job, especially when stretching and stapling the chicken wire, which tends to lacerate and stab like dried-out bougainvillea.  But, overall, a smooth build for three suburbanites with zero farm-type construction experience between them.

It went together like I planned, and it looks like I imagined — success.

So, I guess we better get some chicks.