Denver and Los Angeles Experience Crowds Staring at Chicken Coops

...ed that it just might be a good idea to grow some vegetables and keep some chickens. There’s lots of motivating factors, no doubt. A bad economy and dissatisfaction with factory farming to start. But we also suspect that folks have discovered that it’s just plain fun to do all the old home arts with the handy networking tool known as the internet. Above, the Denver Urban Homesteading meetup group. If you’re in the Denver area (where Mrs. Homegrown...

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Changing the World One Party at a Time

...he organizer wants me, in particular, to address the legalities of keeping chickens. But even if chickens are legal where you live, neighbors can start a ruckus in the henhouse about them and about a whole host of other contentious issues such as parking, trees and landscape maintenance. But if we already know each other socially, these sorts of fights are less likely to start. But I think it would be a mistake to throw neighborhood parities with...

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Talkin’ Chicken

...te problem last week We’re in the Los Angeles Times today “clucking” about chickens. We share mention with fellow Los Angeles urban homesteading bloggists Dakota Witzenburg and Audrey Diehl, who write Green Frieda. Witzenburg designed an amazing coop, complete with a green roof planted with succulents that you can see on Green Frieda here. In other chicken related news, the December/January issue of Backyard Poultry Magazine is hot off the presses...

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In Praise of Disorder

Loose chickens in Houston A neighborhood whose demographics fall somewhere between the extremes of the crack den and the country club presents just the right level of civic inattention to allow the urban homesteader to get away with many of the illegal projects profiled in this blog: greywater, backyard poultry, and front yard vegetable gardening, to mention just a few. Ideally you have a balance between order and disorder–neither gunfire nor the...

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Terror of Tiny Town

...trepid Chicago resident, informed us that someone just gave her two bantam chickens for her backyard, the perfect compliment to her chihuahuas. Some say that bantams are better for smaller backyards due to their diminutive size. Readers with bantam experience please let us know what you think about keeping bantams vs. normal chickens as we only have experience with SUV sized poultry. The photo above is, incidentally, a scene from Werner Herzog’s b...

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