One of my projects this year has been getting “Operation Hen House” up and running. With the completion of our house for the hens in the side yard and the screened in chicken run attached to it, we became the proud “parents” of 5 teenage chickens. They have not yet begun to lay.
All credit for Operation Hen House, goes to the amazing Patrick, who built the house and its accompanying screened in yard and helped me with a bunch of other parts of this project. Patrick is the consummate farmer and builder and my family quickly fell in love with him. The boys helped him to paint the poles of the chicken run and he included them in a number of other (construction) aspects as well.
Having chickens is pretty cool. I feed them little scraps through the chicken wire quite often (their main feeder is in the hen house). They now follow me along the side yard whenever I walk through it hoping I will bestow scraps upon them. We now have 2 separate compost buckets in the kitchen, one for animal food (don’t forget the bunnies) and one for compost waste to go in our compost pile.
The other day as I was out in the garden pulling weeds and trimming overgrown greens, my husband came out to chat with me. “It’s like we live on a farm!” I exclaimed.
“No,” he retorted, “it’s not like we live on a farm, we DO live on a farm.”
Well, just to give you an idea of what it’s like over here….we live about a 10 minute walk from downtown Boulder in a lovely tree lined neighborhood where the houses are very close together. There is not a lot of space. The house takes up most of our yard, however, I do not let that deter me, I just squeeze in everything I can. We have kale where all the flowers used to be, chickens in the side yard and bunnies living inside with us. All of this on less than 1/10th of an acre.
Stay tuned for more gardening, composting, chicken rearing urban farm fun! In the meantime, head on over to Nourishing Days and their blog carnival Food Roots to see what others are sharing in regards to where their food comes from.
Hannah (Hannah's Harvest) says
Elana, i love you even more now. Living the dream!
veggievixen says
as long as you don’t have roosters…someone a few neighborhoods away does and it crows every morning.
Cheryl says
yay chickens! how lovely.
John says
Many years ago my kids brought home chicks they hatched in kindergarten and over the years we kept three in suburban southern California :-)
Your going to love the eggs when they start laying and if all of them are on you’ll get three dozen a week, can’t beat that!
Nan says
Clever set up. We have 3 acres and half a dozen chickens. Quite smart for bird brains. :^D
VeggieGirl says
How adorable! Can’t wait for more updates :)
sarah says
Lovely chickens! Congratulations, fellow chicken mama.
Sarah Schatz - menus for limited diets says
I used to cook for a retreat that is also a farm and they have many chickens that supply the farm with eggs. There is nothing compared to fresh farm eggs! My husband and I plan on doing the same thing you’re doing – we don’t have much space either, but plan on getting chickens within a year.
Shannon says
I love this! I really hope to have chickens soon. Our garden is taking up much of our rented backyard and time for now, but someday…
This would make a perfect contribution to Food Roots tomorrow.
Linda says
Aww..this post brought back childhood memories. I miss going to the hen house to get warm brown eggs for either cooking or baking. Thanks for sharing.