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.

Insects have ceased to be a serious threat, including the grasshoppers that proved such trouble in early spring.  A lot of hands contributed to this success.  For my part, I noticed where new grasshoppers tended to emerge and returned there daily to crush the nymphs.  The praying mantises I released are rapidly maturing based on the few I’ve encountered, and I can only assume they’re doing their share of the pest control since other insects are all they eat.  And we’ve begun letting our four chickens range and eat what bugs they will, turning problems into eggs.  I also distributed 50 feet of floating row cover around sensitive areas of the yard, which seems to have given the seedlings in those plots time to mature unimpeded and uneaten.  However, the heat the covers trap tends to wilt the plants during these hot days of July, so I’ve begun phasing them out.  But they did their part and will be key to next season’s success in the cooler months of early spring.

Nature has finally begun to work with us, or the other way around.  Several pairs of birds are nesting in our yard, including a set of Orioles, and I have watched on several occasions as a bird has swooped in and plucked a caterpillar off a broad squash leaf.  And I haven’t seen the gnawing, strawberry devouring rabbits in weeks.  They used to make daily forays into our yard, but no more — prey to something, I assume.

I have also been fortunate in keeping the powdery mildew that plagued seasons past at bay by treating outbreaks immediately with a spray of one part milk, 10 parts water.

That just leaves the squirrels.

Right outside our property line a colony of California Ground Squirrels took up residence, and the eight or so animals seemed to feed only on our edibles, chewing the growing tips off of every vine, eating new sprouts into the ground, pulling down wheat and rye stalks, biting into immature squash, melons, and almonds, and generally ravaging plots in our lower, upper, and front yards — including those planted right up against the house.  The row covers seemed to provide a bit of a temporary obstacle, but the fencing that kept the rabbits out sure didn’t.  Marigolds and other defensive plantings proved ineffectual.  I put out packs of pelleted fox urine in an attempt to make them fear fear itself, and this worked, except on windy days, of which we have many.  The scent deterrent was most effective on days when it could just hang in the air.  But the squirrels only needed one breezy afternoon to devour weeks of progress.

While planting a last effort at a late-start warm season crop in June, I felt I had little choice but to get rid of the squirrels.  Trap and release is no good.  In California it is only legal to trap them, not release them, because they carry diseases and are classified as agricultural pests.  Shooting them with a .22 is only recommended in rural areas, and would likely be ineffective and time consuming.  They won’t scare easy with a scarecrow or other predator mimic.  Natural predators and domestic pets can’t control their populations, typically.

I decided to poison them, which infringes a bit on the permacultural ideals I’d hoped to establish here.  And it’s hard to say how it’s much different than the poisoning practices of industrial agriculture.  I find arguments of scale and magnitude self serving and unconvincing.  It’s clearly an industrial move.  But, at the same time, I found the prospect of harvesting no warm season edibles for a second year unacceptable.  Resources are wasted on an organic, super-local effort that yields nothing.

Poisoning is not a friendly, humane enterprise.  I chose an anticoagulant bait, which is housed in a feed station only squirrels and similar animals can access, rather than a pelleted poison broadcast on the ground.  This minimizes the collateral damage like a smart bomb does.  It’s also a low-dose poison that must be eaten regularly over several days to kill — again to reduce the likelihood of a non-target animal dying.

But, in the end, something does die.  Horribly.

An anticoagulant prevents blood from clotting, so a bruise or a bump turns into an internal (or external) hemorrhage that never stops.  I have no fantasies of squirrels curling up in warm dens and drifting off to a peaceful sleep from which they will not awake, none the wiser, because I have found them immobile, panting, and scared, the ants already upon them.  And I should find them and see it, and own the decision, so that next season it doesn’t come to such a false dichotomy: food or squirrels.

I haven’t seen a squirrel in weeks.  The garden flourishes.  Next year we’ll do better.

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.

Yesterday the farm-ish-ness of our suburban fifth acre took a big leap forward: Our shipment of baby chicks arrived.  Our first farm staple.  We ordered them in February from an online vendor, My Pet Chicken, that had an informative site and wide variety of breeds — despite the superficial name.  The main criteria for selecting this hatchery ended up being its minimum order of three, whereas nearly every other seller and shipper of chicks required a purchase in the range of 10-to-25.  While we’re zoned for up to 25 chickens, we were thinking more like three or four.

We ordered four, a small number that ended up bearing out the contention of most hatcheries that day-old chicks need the heat of 10-to-25 little bodies to survive shipping.  One of our chicks didn’t make it, the Australorp, which was a surprisingly wrenching discovery.  They’re damn effective at being damn cute.  I think this reaction all but rules out raising chickens for meat.  We buried the Australorp in the garden where the Sun Flowers will grow.

The chicks arrived yesterday morning while I was teaching a class, delivered by our fantastic mailman, Gregg, who brought them by before tackling his route so they wouldn’t have to sit in his truck.  Sarah expertly, if worriedly, handled introducing the sluggish, road-worn chicks to their brooder, dipping their beaks in water so they’d know where to drink (they arrive more than parched) and setting them on the bedding.  I had read a recommendation just a day or so before that the wood-chip bedding be covered with nubby paper towels sprinkled with feed for the first few days to encourage the chicks to peck and eat food rather than wood chips.  We went with that, and it seems to be working.

Sarah said they arrived looking half-dead, wobbly, refusing to chirp, drink, or peck, but with a few quick Google searches she found these characteristics to be expected after such a traumatic first day of life.  Within a few hours the surviving chicks had perked up into a noisy threesome.  Now, I don’t want to call my pregnant wife broody, but she attended to these babies like a pro.  Chicks are shipped day-old because they can live off of their yolk fat for up to 48 hours.  They do need water and 95-degree heat, though, which are two necessities not included in transit.  The box they arrived in was just big enough to hold a pair of boots and insulated with a few inches of hay shaped into a rough nest.  A small heating pad, like a mini Icy Hot, sat at the center.

While I believe My Pet Chicken did everything they could to ensure the chicks arrived healthy and safe, after the loss of the Australorp and seeing the condition the others arrived in, we couldn’t justify ordering chicks online again.  It involves a little more pain and suffering than we’re willing to inflict on a one-day-old animal.  For those readers in San Diego, Kahoots Feed & Pet in Ramona has a good variety of chicks and everything you need to care for them, with a friendly and knowledgeable staff.  Ask for Kyle.  The next time we’re in the market for chicks, that’s where we’ll get them.

In addition to the Australorp, we ordered a Rhode Island Red, a Barred Rock, and a Buff Orpington.  They are all good layers, and relatively big birds when grown, which will hopefully give them some security when they’re old enough to roam the yard.  And we wanted to raise breeds other than those that dominate the industrial CAFO‘s, like the White Leghorn.  The single-breed dominance that has risen from commercial egg and meat production has threatened the existence of many traditional breeds.

Already, the chicks have distinguished themselves in their little brood.  The Red clearly dominates the others.  The Buff is the largest, puffy and noisy.  And then there’s the Rock.  The Rock seems to be a little runty and just a touch narcoleptic.  She has healthy behavior, like pecking and drinking and roaming.  But she also just stops, plops down, droops her head to floor, and nods off.  Rather suddenly.

That’s day one.  Twenty more weeks to eggs.

Apparently there is an art and, as one might expect, a science to composting.  To be clear, there is no art to my effort.  But I read extensively about the science of composting.  I chose a location that gets sun, but not a full day’s sun because here in San Diego that would most likely dry out the pile — and to function biologically, the pile needs to be about as damp as a wrung out sponge.  I dutifully watered my pile, and while I never checked the moisture content with anything technical, it never started stinking, which is an indicator that the pile is too wet.  I have also been pretty good with the carbon-nitrogen balance, not that I have ever weighed or measured anything I’ve dumped onto my pile.  The idea is, brown, dead plant material, ash, and newspaper are carbon contributors, while green clippings from the yard and animal waste (like chicken manure) are nitrogen contributors.  The C:N ratio is supposed to be 25:1.

I never turned my pile, but there are two schools of thought on that: in one school, you turn it; in the other, you don’t.  The Turning School of Compost Development says the turning evens out the composting process by mixing the less composted surface material with the more composted lower levels, resulting in a finer soil.  The turning also injects a burst of oxygen into the pile, which speeds up the aerobic bacteria and the composting process.  The Leave It School of Compost Engineering says that this very burst of productivity burns out critical components of the composting process, and disturbs basically every level of organism involved in turning stuff into soil.  Leaving it is doing it like nature does it.

But in my yard, nature hasn’t been doing it.

I have picked up a few tips along the way, little “oh, right” moments here and there.  The first came from a former student, Mike, who suggested I not dump oranges and orange peels into the pile because they are too acidic for some of the organisms at work there.  Great tip.  Stopped doing that.  Another good one: I read that two piles is essential because at some point I need to stop putting new stuff into the pile so it can finish.  That one seems kind of common-sense obvious.  I hadn’t been doing this, which might be why my pile still looks like a pile of debris.  I started a second pile last week.

Composting has many sustainable-living perks.  The two most relevant to reducing my wife and I’s impact elsewhere are the reduction in trash we send out and in the soil amendments we bring in.  The average American tosses 1,460 pounds of garbage into landfills every year.  Recycling helps, of course, but organics that won’t recycle will compost.  We throw out maybe one small bag of garbage each week (and it definitely does not weigh 70 pounds).  And even if the amendments we bring in are all organic and chemical-free, there’s still an industrial process behind whatever we add to our yard each season.  We’d rather make our own.

So, I think I’ll turn that pile this weekend.  Soon I should be getting some help stewarding the compost.  Apparently the chickens I just ordered will be a boon to the effort with their scratching and droppings.

The pile could use a boon.

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.