“You’re going to raise WHAT????” Tami sputtered, laughing so hard I thought about getting out the defibrillator.
“Chickens,” I said, with a great deal of dignity, “What’s so funny about a few chickens in the backyard?”
“Maybe the fact that I’m not even sure you know where your backyard IS?” she asked.
I blame Brenda.
Ernie’s mom Brenda, out in Atlanta, somehow acquired a gift certificate for three exotic chickens, and posted a Facebook query wondering which kind she should get. I actually work with a real live chicken farmer, Mike (by day a brilliant and sweet-natured developer, by night a crusading locavore egg manager), so I asked him for advice.
Mike never says much about normal things, but ask him about chickens and he’ll talk your ear off. He spilled chapter, book and chicken verse into my willing ear, extolling the virtues of several chicken varieties.
Really? There are varieties of chickens?
He lectured me on flightiness, egg production and the ins and outs of broodiness. Broodiness is when the hen objects to donating her eggs to her beloved human mamma and instead hides them in untoward places. This is bad, because the ideal chicken gleefully tosses her eggs into your skillet, so the variety matters.
“So, do I get them from Amazon?” I asked.
He gave me a long look. “Start here,” he ordered, sending me to a website for urban chicken farmers, “That’s the best place to learn more about raising chickens.”
Intrigued, I spent a half hour browsing the site, which caters to a heretofore undiscovered subculture of chicken-addicted humans, and we ain’t talkin’ country-fried drumsticks.
Nope. Backyardchickens.com is all about true chicken love and the many varied rewards of chicken ownership. For example:
- Chicken poop is apparently such a fabulous fertilizer that neighbors and garden centers will line up at your coop by the hundreds (and pay small fortunes) for it..
- Chickens scratch around your flowerbeds and revitalize your plants.
- They gorge on weed seeds and obnoxious insects but leave the good bugs alone, giving you the most glorious vegetable garden in town.
- They love to cuddle their special humans (question: How the hell do you cuddle a chicken?).
- They can be taught to play the piano.
- They have glorious, peacock-like feathers that sell for serious money to hatmakers, cosplayers, and Las Vegas costumers.
- They’re hypoallergenic.
- At night, their melodious chuckles soothe you to sleep.
Every bullet point increased my enthusiasm. Holy hell! Where have chickens BEEN all my life?
Besides, if I run across the rare surly or underperforming chicken…I have a great dinner in my future.
A chicken, I concluded, is the perfect multipurpose pet: A family member that MAKES me money instead of costing. Not only will she supply my breakfast, she also takes care of that hated gardening chore: Weeding.
I slipped off to sleep that night dreaming of my new life as a backyard chicken rancher.
Every morning I greet my cheerful biddies, who lovingly nuzzle my hand as I slip under their cozy-warm derrieres, seeking breakfast. I choose a few jewel-toned eggs (YES, you can get natural colored Easter eggs!), and whip up a perfect cheese souffle for my applauding guests.
Later, I drowse in the sun as my hens industriously pull weeds, trim the grass, and fertilize the rhodies. My bank account swells from the sale of chicken poo–er, fertilizer and what I’ve saved by firing the gardener.
Sold. The very next morning I started designing chicken coops and planning a natural-colored Easter egg hunt.
I was a bit concerned about the rooster issue: Like most males, roosters can be squawkingly loud and obnoxious. I suspected that my neighbors would take a dim view of a next-door alarm clock set for sunrise. But my mom grew up on a farm, so I figured she’d have a solution.
“Hey, Mom, can you give a rooster a laryngectomy?”
“Beg pardon?” she asked, so I explained about my new venture and the need to keep the rooster quiet. After a long silence, she dropped a bombshell (or maybe an eggshell): Hens can lay eggs WITHOUT A ROOSTER.
Whoa–did you know that?
I’m a little hazy on the methodology, but apparently a hen doesn’t need actual sex to make eggs, so a rooster is superfluous as far as my breakfast is concerned.
“You are (XX) years old and you STILL don’t know how hens make eggs?” Mom, “We should have taken you to the country when you were a little girl. You are NOT ready to have chickens.”
She gave a big thumbs-down on the whole chicken venture, and scoffed at the rosy picture painted by BackyardChickens.com.
“…noisy, filthy, and they stink to high heaven,” she said emphatically, “They are dumb as dirt, mean as can be, and far too much work. You can buy a fryer and a dozen eggs at Winco for five bucks, so raise chickens in your backyard? Are you crazy?”
I’m paraphrasing but she definitely was against the whole project.
On the other hand…Google says that Portland ranks highest in searching on terms such as “backyard chickens,” and “chicken coops,” so how bad could chickens be? Farm-fresh eggs, which I love, have about as much in common with grocery store eggs as a Ferrari does to roller skates. Maybe Mom was living in the murky past when chickens were primitive.
Sorry, Mom. Clearly, the chicken world has advanced since you were a kid.
I started monitoring egg auctions and thumbing through breed descriptions to find MY chickens. I’d just about settled on Easter Eggers and Rhode Island Reds, and started planning a “tractor coop” for enhanced portability. So… 25 chickens cost less than 50 bucks. If my flock laid two dozen straight-from-the-chicken-butt pearls per day, at $5 or $6 per dozen, that’s $12 per day just for eggs.
I was going to make a KILLING. I mentioned this to a chicken-owning buddy.
“Maybe,” he said cautiously, “But not all 25 eggs will hatch. You’ll probably wind up with 10 or 12 laying hens. Then you’ll lose a few more while you clear out the predators.”
Predators?
“Yeah, like raccoons. If there’s a raccoon within ten miles it’ll find your hens. Bite the heads right off.”
I froze. “As a matter of fact,” I said cautiously, “A raccoon family lives under my deck…”
“Well, get rid of them now or your chickens will last about ten minutes,” he warned, “Same goes for foxes and coyotes. Nothing they like better than a nice, fat hen. You need a reinforced chicken coop that you can lock down every night.”
My happy backyard of sunning hens morphed into a prison fortress surrounded by concertina wire, guard dogs, and me with a shotgun, on 24X7 patrol.
“Oh, don’t forget the truck to haul off the manure. And a contract with wherever you’re going to dump it,” he added.
“No, no,” I contradicted confidently, “I’ll sell whatever’s left from fertilizing my yard. It’ll be a nice side income.” He snorted.
“Good luck with that,” he said, “You can fertilize your yard for a year on a month’s worth of chicken manure, after you dig it out of the coop. And it has to compost for at least six months first or you’ll burn your plants. And no,” he said, holding up a hand as I thought of an alternate solution, “You can’t train chickens to use the litter box. I pay a guy to take mine and he’s not cheap.”
Prison fortress surrounded by concertina wire and smelly mountains of chicken poop. The neighbors were gonna love this…not. And I need a good 30 minutes to steel myself for the CAT litterbox.
Unfortunately, he wasn’t done.
“Is your backyard large enough?” he asked, “You gotta get a permit if you’re going to have more than three chickens in Portland, and the chickens must stay at least 25 feet away from your neighbors and your property lines.”
OK, this was getting complicated.
I started adding numbers…$2,500 for a reinforced chicken coop, $1,000 or so for permits, an incubator, warming lights, food, lice dust, hauling manure and such, plus the cost of chickens and replacement chickens. Vet bills, losses to predators, visits from the exterminator, neighborhood lawsuits…
Figuring conservatively, my new venture would cost maybe $5 per egg…
“You know,” said my boss, thoughtfully, “Mike sells fresh eggs from his chickens, brings them right to the office. Couple bucks a dozen…”
Sold.
Brought back happy memories of when I lived bush, and had chooks and ducks for eggs and the pot. Loved watching them but I had lots of room. A lot of work and constant trouble from wildlife, the worst being a 6 foot brown snake that move in to live of eggs. Very deadly to humans and not good for my pants as it chased me around the chookshed.
I’m happy to buy them when I can. Big supermarkets here push councils to enforce every health and business regulation to stop old fashioned trade.
Peter.
ROTFLMAO!!!! i kept telling brenda that she was nuts for thinking of getting chickens – stupid and stinky!!!!! – and she finally saw the reality i THINK ;P i just think it’s easier and moe pleasant to buy eggs at the grocery store ;P i’ve been around enuf livestock up in ct to not need to go there ;P
Thanks, Brandie. I love making those collages, although a lot of it is Photoshop filters, not me.
I dunno about the eggs; I thought they needed a rooster, too, but my mom says they just lay them unfertilized and pretty much keep on doing it. Maybe their hormones rev up or something if there’s an eligible bachelor in the neighborhood, but since investigating this I’ve talked with several people who get X eggs per day with no rooster around for miles.
Who knows?
I really like the chicken/egg picture you featured on this blog entry!
We get our eggs fresh from a local source. Not only do they taste fabulous, but I know they are coming from happy, “truly” free-range girls…These girls were the inspiration behind a collage I recently made titled “Sacred Community” where I gave the chickens their own stained glass window in their coop…Ha!
I have also romanticized the notion of raising my own chickens! But for now am content to leave it up to the professionals and pay my $3.00/dozen. Our neighbors just purchased 6 chicks at Easter and are promising to supply us with eggs in a couple months time. However, I have a friend who insists they need a rooster nearby to stimulate egg production…???
racoons are really smart, and can figure out how to open latched cages. you have to use something that requires 2 motions to get open, or a lock. terribly cute and nice as young pets, but not so nice after a few years when the wild gene gets more pronounced. we had one that was leash trained and liked going for walks, which led to odd looks from the neighbors whilst walking down the street…
I was going to warn you about the racoons. Glad you got an education prior to learning from experience. :o)
i’ve had both chickens and pheasants when i was a kid (one of the advantages of having a high school bio teacher as a mom), along with snakes, raccoons, possums, owls, and other random live animal babies that get taken to the bio teacher out in the country.
chickens are as dumb as hammers, mean, smelly, and everything your mom said. they also have to be brought inside during inclement weather (extreme cold or heat).
buy the eggs.
PS: i learned really early not to sample what’s cooking on the stove without asking first. mom had a bad habit of bringing home road kill and boiling it on the stove to remove the meat. seems it was a cheap way to get skeletons for class, or skins to teach how to stuff and mount.