(sub)Urban Farming

This is a reprint of my very first published article in the 2012 Spring Region 12 Newsletter for the American Hemerocallis Society.  I had never really thought I wanted to write for publication before, but I actually had a good time with it, and with writing the local club news article at the back of the issue. My apologies for the redundancy to those of you who have followed the blog.  If you know me, you already know all of this. But I hope you enjoy the recap!

When Greg Crane asked me to write a piece for the newsletter about “Chickens and Daylilies” I was, frankly, stumped. I’m a part-time blogger, and I’ve written about our chickens, and I’ve written about our daylilies on www.cari-daway.blogspot.com. But I 

never really thought about “Chickens AND Daylilies.”  A few weeks were spent with this 

concept rolling around in my mind, and more than a few attempts at writing that were actually spent looking at a blank screen and a blinking cursor. I asked the Facebook universe for ideas. My friend Timi said she understood my block by equating her being asked to write about her jeep and her dogs: two things she loves but don’t really intersect. 

One of our daylily club friends, Kyle Pierson, said that the feathers of the chickens could be like the colors in daylilies, or that going out to see the flowers in the morning is like looking for eggs. All are valid points. But nothing really lit my literary pilot light. I 

flirted briefly with the comparison of my hobby of collecting lists of potential chicken names (such as Magdalena Van der Flocken) with some daylily enthusiasts’ hobby of collecting lists of potential daylily names (I know you’re out there. Terri Jones can’t be the only one who does this!) Then it hit me: Poop! Yes, poop. Not literally, thank goodness. Put a pin in that thought, we’ll return to it in a few minutes.

I realized that the chickens were an integral part of the mini eco-system we’ve created in
our little neighborhood city lot. My husband and I both have green thumbs. I also have a
passion for healthy organic food and a clean environment that borders on the obsessive
(and occasionally annoying.) These qualities combined a few years ago into a 10-tower
hydroponic garden, a square-foot garden for my kitchen herbs and natural pest control
aphid-trapping bed, a worm composter and traditional compost bin, and our chickens:
Phyllis, Pearl and Francine. We also grow about 150 daylily cultivars. Small potatoes in
the daylily world, but when you consider how tiny our house and lot is, that’s about all
we have room for. I believe that in the chemical sense, one should impact the earth as
little as possible, but while doing that impacting, one should get as much out of it as one
can in the space allotted.

In the hydroponic garden, we grow enough produce to feed ourselves, the chickens, the
neighbors, my Pilates instructor, the girls at the local tea shop and sometimes our friends,
family and co-workers. The catnip grows especially well, as do tomatoes, Swiss chard,
onions, carrots, basil, snow peas, broccoli, cabbage, cucumbers, beans and many other
things. The ability to grow 6 times the produce in the same space as conventional
gardening appeals to me, as does the ability to do it without chemical pesticides,
fertilizers or fungicides that leach into the water table or harm wildlife. The only real
challenge we had was squirrels. Eventually Jay caged in the entire structure with chicken
wire, and that has kept out the squirrels, but continues to let in a tiny field mouse with
whom we’ve agreed to share. He doesn’t eat as much as a dozen squirrels do, so it seems
like a good balance. And the structure only looks a little bit like a prison camp….. but I
digress.

  Two years ago, Jay and I decided to get chickens. He spent about two months of
weekends and a spring break building a really nice coop. He is especially proud of its
door. In April of 2010 we brought home Babette, (who later grew into Bobette and had to go back to the farm) Sylvia, Pearl and Phyllis. Sylvia has since passed away, but Francine recently joined our flock. During the construction of the coop, Jay had dug up and potted all the daylilies so he’d have room to work without having to worry about tromping all over them in his many trips back and forth across the yard. When the coop was finished, he built two big (for our yard, about 8’ x 8’) raised beds about 18” high, to put all the daylilies back into. Here’s where the poop comes in. I told you we’d get back to that.

We – and let there be no doubt that when I say “we” it is all “Jay” - filled the beds with 

compost and bagged oak leaves we liberated from lawns and curb sides all over South
Tampa. But what really got the beds ready for replanting for the daylilies were the 

chickens. We finally got brave enough to let our very spoiled, indulged, coddled and
generally over-protected city chickens out of the coop to free-range every afternoon
(supervised closely, of course.) Jay tossed sunflower seeds up into the empty beds and the girls hopped in and started turning over the soil and, well, pooping. Poop = fertilizer = daylilies. Happy daylilies. 2011 was our best daylily season ever. The sunflower seeds in one of the beds did not get eaten as much as the other, so at one point we had a bed full of giant sunflowers with happy daylilies growing in their shade. When it became time to cut down all the sunflowers to give the daylilies room to grow, I dried the heads and gave them to the chickens. Poop = fertilizer = sunflowers = chicken treats = eggs + poop.

Every morning, Jay takes organic brown rice mixed with organic yogurt out to “the
girls,” and in bloom season he deadheads the daylilies and chucks them into the chicken
coop along with some Swiss chard, field-mouse-chewed tomatoes, or carrot tops from the
hydroponic garden. Since we don’t ever spray any dangerous chemicals in our daylilies
or in our hydroponic garden plants, we can safely feed them to the chickens. Poop =
fertilizer = daylilies + hydroponic vegetables = chicken treats = eggs + poop.

Since we have the chickens, and because I’m pretty militant about not spraying chemicals all over the yard that my chickens and invited wildlife and beneficial insects frequent, we do occasionally have to deal with uninvited guests such as aphids or sooty mold in the veggies that are in the squash family. This is where the worm composting and square foot garden comes in. Worm tea is a great anti-bacterial and insecticide that is safe to use in the garden. Gaura lindheimeri 'Whirling Butterflies’ is an aphid magnet. We plant it in a small square foot bed in relative close proximity to other plants that are aphid candy like daylilies or hibiscus, and the aphids glom onto the stems of the Guara and tend to stay off the plant we actually care about. Jay calls the stems “Aphid Popcicles” because I cut them off when they’re loaded up with aphids and feed them to the chickens. In the past, I’ve brought in ladybugs to then eat the aphids, but for the last couple of years, I just let the chickens eat them. If the aphids wipe out the Guara it’s not a big loss since they reseed like crazy, and are only $3 at the garden center. They’re cute, too. Worm tea + castings = Guara = aphid magnet = chicken treats = eggs + poop.

I bet you’re wondering now “What does she do with all that poop?” We make compost,
of course. And the cycle continues. We can use the compost to top dress the daylily
beds, and the butterfly garden, as well as supplement the Guara and my kitchen herb
garden. The compost bin is located next to the door that opens to clean out the hen house,
so I just have to scoop, turn and dump. Of course the garden and kitchen produce waste
that doesn’t get fed to the worms or the chickens goes into the pile, as well as eggshells
and tea leaves we pick up from a local tea shop and coffee grounds we get from Whole
Foods. It’s also located next to the fence by the neighbor’s yard, so they toss their kitchen waste into it as well.

Our chickens give us enjoyment every day, along with the eggs and poop we use to keep
our daylilies growing. Our daylilies give us enjoyment every day during bloom season,
and are good treats for the chickens. They do look a little like bloody dinosaurs when
they dig into a deadheaded blossom from a red cultivar, though. That can be a little
disconcerting. They love to take dust baths underneath my kitchen herb garden, and also
work diligently to keep down the unwelcome insect population in the yard. We rely on
our hydroponic farm to feed the chickens, and ourselves and compost whatever we can in
order to keep the cycle going. So there you have it. Chicken poop is the substance which
binds our (sub)Urban eco-system together.




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Chicklet Update

We've had the chickens a little over a week now.  Progress has been made on the name front for half of them.  The Frizzle is now Phyllis, and the Cochin is now Babette.  We're still struggling over what to name The Twins.  They are all developing their own distinct habits, but really only Babette and Phyllis are showing any signs of personality and behavioral distinction.  The Twins are more skittish (actually, everyone is skittish around me unless I have soybeans or bulgur wheat)  Jay is a much better chicken whisperer than I am, and is more willing to chase them down and force interaction than I am.  Whenever I go out there, The Twins are convinced it's bed time and troop up the ladder into the hen house.  Babette comes waddling over to see if I've brought a treat, and Phyllis starts to follow The Twins up the ladder, but stops half way to see if Babette is onto something.

 

As far as coop improvements go, we've made some adjustments and enhancements.  We noticed the girls are panting a bit (and it's only April!!!) The coop is very shady until the late afternoon, when that western sun hits it and the reflective roof isn't much help. We found an outdoor roll-up shade and attached it so I can go out in the afternoons and unroll it to give them more refuge from the sun.

I also bought a small shallow storage bin.  I am deciding between making it a chicken pool or a sand box.  Both water and sand have cooling properties.  Jay added roosts to the hen house.  They don't get used at night unless Jay picks them up (which they hate) and puts them up on them, but I see Phyllis and the Twins on them a lot during the day.

I got a new chair to sit on in there, and added a small roost across the top of a bushel basket so they could practice.  Here, one of The Twins is practicing. She fell off immediately after I took the shot, but now that I have it full of paving stones, at least it doesn't topple over when they fall off.  I'm hoping that, since they obviously understand the concept of roosting, they will eventually decide it's a neat way to sleep at night and we won't have to traumatize them every night by moving them up on top of their snazzy roosts in the dark.  Normally they snuggle up under the roost bar - except Babette.  She finds a roost in the coop to sit on and has to be moved the whole way into the house at night.

I haven't had as much time to spend with them as I had hoped, but I go out every night for a little while when it's cool and hang out in my chair with them.  I really enjoy just watching them peck around and peep at each other.  Sometimes when I'm at the kitchen window I look out and see them chasing each other around or just flying for no apparent reason across the coop.  I see some occasional chicken chest-bumping, but nothing ever really mean going on. 

Re-Coop-erating!

After almost a solid month of weekends where we had other obligations, we finally got to get back to working on the coop.  I've been pretty anxious about getting it completed to the point that  we could safely order our chicks.  I wanted to get them settled as soon as possible as we have an even busier May than we did March. 

A lot has been done since the last post about the coop.  The trench around the bottom has been filled back in (and yes, I did fall into it one evening while I was looking at some potted daylilies.)  I used some bags of pine needles we snagged from my sister-in-law's apartment back in October to put around the perimeter to keep the black dirt from getting tracked everywhere.  I'm planning on planting sunflowers and edible peas or beans around the sides and front to help give the girls some shade, and to expand our food growing capacity.  It'll make things pretty, too.




The hen house floor has been built and covered in linoleum, and the egg boxes and access door (for cleaning purposes) have been built.

 The next steps are the roof installation, (waiting for the order to come into Home Depot) building the door, shingling the roof of the egg box, painting, and installing the latches, chains and locks.  We also need to construct a brooder box for the peeps to live in once they come home, but that's a pretty quick process with a rubbermaid bin and a heat light.

You can see, I'm not the only one excited about this being completed!  Once he finishes this, Jay is going to build the raised bed for the remaining 55 daylilies that have been waiting patiently for their turn to be planted in a nice new home.

                                      

Chicken Coop Construction

Here is the coop so far.  We ended up taking a few weekends off due to family and work commitments, but we'll get back to it soon enough.  The  next steps are to install the roofing panels and build the hen house area with the nesting boxes.  I'm hoping that once that part is complete, we'll be able to order our chicks.  We can keep the brooding box in the hen house until the chicks are old enough to be in the coop, and until we get the whole coop enclosed in hardware cloth.
We had dinner with some friends who are genuine farm-folk and they were rolling their eyes at me talking about how we are planning names for our chickens, and how we're going to keep them even beyond their egg-laying years.