The Community Chickens project is about to begin! Mother Earth News and our sister publication, Grit, are working together to test and tell you about all sorts of things related to poultry. Over the next few months, we’ll write about incubators, a brooder, feeders and waterers, fencing and feed.

We plan to hatch chicken, duck, guinea and turkey eggs, and we’ll share our experiences raising the babies. As always, we’ll provide information on alternative and time-tested methods. (See Furry and Feathered Friends Welcome on Grit’s website for photos of a broody hen and the chicks she hatched.)

While we’re waiting for the hatching eggs to arrive, I’ve set up the poultry box brooder from GQF Manufacturing. (I still need to install the light bulbs and remove some of the protective plastic from shipping.) It’s important to be ready for chicks when they arrive.

PHOTO BY TROY GRIEPENTROG

I’m looking forward to trying out the brooder. It should be easy to clean and make taking care of the new chicks easy. In the past, I’ve used various types of homemade brooders, including cardboard boxes with a small board across the top to suspend a heat lamp from. That works for a few birds for a short time, but it’s important to make sure the cardboard doesn’t get too warm and create a fire hazard.

A new website for the Community Chickens project will be live early next week. That site will give you easy access to all the information about the project, plus great tips on raising poultry. Check back for a link to that site.

PHOTO BY HEIDI HUNT

Starting garden beds from scratch, as I am doing at my new digs, can be challenging – grass roots, clay soil and deep weed taproots all conspire to make the process time consuming and back breaking. Sure, you can rent a heavy-duty rototiller, but you still have to deal with the clods of grass roots and unyielding clay clumps. So, I decided to go the raised bed route – four 4-foot by 8-foot beds, each a foot deep.

You’re thinking – sure, but you still have to make the bed frames and haul yards of dirt. True, but I am using some wonderful raised bed corners, suggested by our garden writer, Barbara Pleasant, and available from Lee Valley Tools. What a marvelous invention these corners are. As you can see from the photo, the 2-by-6 lumber just slips into sleeves on the stakes. AND, you can add a second (or third) stake and sleeves to the top of the first one, to make the bed 12 inches (or more) high. It is suggested you strengthen the unit by putting a screw into each sleeve/board team, which we have done. This should help keep the boards from bowing outwards due to the pressure from the dirt.

Speaking of dirt – I would love to start planting this weekend, but have four plus cubic yards of the brown stuff to move from the driveway to the new beds. Soooooooooooo – it’s party time! We've invited a bunch of friends to a barbecue on Saturday – we’ll provide the food and we hope our guests will provide a bit of muscle power and help us to move the dirt!! I’ll let you know next week how successful this venture turns out to be.

I did mow the yard last weekend and used some of the lovely, aromatic clippings in the garden box where some garlic is happily growing. This week I’ll save the clippings to use as mulch in the new raised beds. We have had four neighbors ask about the beds and jokingly put in their order for fresh veggies this summer. I do hope to produce enough to share.

If you have had success with unique urban food production, share your experiences in the comments section below.

During these tough times it might be interesting to find out how far you can make $20 go. Here is the challenge: during the course of a week (or a day!), start out with one $20 bill in your wallet. Keep track of how you were able to meet regular expenses with the $20. You could, of course, use it all on a tank of gas. But consider some of your usual non-essential purchases, such as lunch, a magazine, a latte or a car wash.

See how far you can make that bill stretch. Show us how thrifty you can be.

Post your results in the comment section below.

PHOTO BY FREDERICK J. DUNN

Nothing says spring like the sound of peeps — newly hatched chickens — in my incubators. It seems to be the time of year when folks stop into the feed store or local hatchery expecting to begin their selection of new birds for their backyard barnyard. However, you may find it easier and more convenient to shop for your chicks online.

Here in the United States, the postal system accepts boxes filled with day-old chicks and delivers them coast to coast in two to three days on average. The chicks travel by Priority Mail and often have no food or water in their cardboard carrier to sustain them. How can this happen? Just prior to hatching, a chick absorbs all the remaining nutrients from within its egg. With this nourishment, the chick can survive for up to three days without food or water. This makes it possible to ship them by mail. In the nest, this process allows the mother to wait out the hatching of other chicks in her clutch before tending to the early hatchers: If chicks required immediate attention, the mother would leave with those that hatched first and the unhatched chicks would perish. Once again, nature has provided well for the chicken!

Selecting a hatchery to buy from couldn’t be simpler. You can start by visiting the Mother Earth News hatchery finder and search for the chicken breed or variety you want. You can also check the hatchery directory where you can sort hatcheries and poultry breeders by state or by company name for ease of reference. Nearly every variety of chicken, either purebred or hybrid, is now only a mouse-click away.

Take time to read about breeds you are interested in and understand what their unique characteristics are. This is a great opportunity to get children involved, showing them the various physical features of different breeds: comb type, leg feathering, silky, frizzle, bantam, standard, etc. You may read that some bantams are not “true bantams.” This is simply a variety which is a miniature version of a large standard breed. For example, a bantam Dark Brahma is a miniature, as it has a large counterpart by the same breed name. On the other hand, a Silver Sebright is a true bantam, meaning that it only exists in the miniature form with no large counterpart.

In the short video below, I demonstrate both the importance of having a brooder set up before your chicks arrive and of collecting the peeps as soon as you receive the call from the post office. Postal workers will gladly share stories about recipients who don’t seem to be in a rush to collect their chicks (waiting a day or more) only to collect a box of half perished little ones. If you are not ready to receive live chicks, do not place an order with a hatchery. 

Here's another useful video demonstrating how to place a catalog order to a hatchery, what the terms mean and what you may expect to pay for purebred poultry.

Last week I shared with you my upcoming move to an urban homestead home. 

Well, it has all happened! The boxes are being unpacked, the herbs are anxious to get into the ground and we hope this weekend to build the four raised beds in the backyard.

As with most moves there have been a few “adjustments.” The biggest was the appearance of a small springlet, after a sudden downpour, in what we thought was a very dry basement. Surprise! As our realtor said, “There is not a dry basement in an old home in town.” How comforting. But he did refer us to the venerable foundation man, who we are hoping will have a sure-fire solution to the problem - today.

As the movers were unpacking the truck, I discovered the metal garbage can I use to store bird seed. I had put the feeders into the can just before moving. So, I got out the feeders, hung them from a wrought iron planter stand and filled them with seed. To my surprise, within a couple of hours English sparrows, and pairs of house finches, cardinals and ring-necked doves were at the feeder. Just like that, the word went around the neighborhood that a new fast-food joint had opened.

I noticed two bunnies in the neighbor’s yard. My Boston terrier noticed them, too. I am hoping she will be my garden guardian against the hungry hoard. But first, we need a fence to keep her from running down the driveway and a dog door so she can let herself out. More to come next week!

There are chickens and then there are CHICKENS! The modern factory-farmed chicken breed is a Leghorn. That breed’s ability to become broody and set a clutch of eggs to hatching stage has just about been bred out of them. Chickens that are hatched in incubators, as factory-farmed chickens are, do not need to know how to incubate and care for a brood of chicks.

However, most of the heritage breeds of chickens, those breeds that have been successful free rangers for generations, make great moms. There are also some poultry breeds that produce a slightly higher egg count per year, those that are easier to tame and others that seem to be especially good alarmists when danger approaches.

If you are keeping a small flock of chickens in your backyard or on a small acreage, tell us which breeds you have come to admire and why, in the comments section below.

For eight months I have been anticipating sharing this news with you – I am moving!!! Not a big move as moves go, only about 5 miles, in fact. But the change in the neighborhood atmosphere will, I hope, be substantial.

I currently reside in a suburban setting in a four bedroom, 2,300-square-foot house. A reduction in the size of my family has signaled this is a good time to reduce my eco-footprint in general and downsize to a considerably smaller abode – 1,300 square feet (with a full, clean, dry basement) to be specific. The basement will be a necessary repository for the canning jars, books, scrapbooks, photos, kids stuff, etc. that there is no room for on the main level. In addition to a smaller house, the yard will be about half the size of my current one. But it’s a clean slate, no gardens at the moment.

Why, you might wonder, am I sharing this life change with you? Well, I am looking at this move as an opportunity to engage in urban homesteading. Does that mean filling the whole lot with veggies and fruit and a small coop for chickens? Not exactly, although I do plan on constructing four raised beds to continue my love of fresh tomatoes, garlic, potatoes, strawberries and raspberries – ahhhhh! For me, homesteading is as much about developing community as it is about growing tomatoes. Where would our homesteading ancestors have been without the support and cooperation of their friends and neighbors? The historical neighborhood I’m moving to may not have a blacksmith or wheelwright shop, but it does have a neighborhood florist, a church where all the community meetings are held, a park for barbecues, potlucks, parades and plant swaps, and folks I’ve already discovered who are avid gardeners. Certainly they will be interested in trading bulbs and seeds, and sharing their gardening successes and failures.

By locating in an historic downtown community, I’ll also be within bicycle range of the library, my own church and the Saturday farmer’s market. It’s been 45 years since I explored on a bike and I’m looking forward to the experience.

Over the next few months I plan to share my urban homesteading adventures with you, including some photos, as soon as I learn how to download from a digital camera – there’s always something new to learn!

If you have had some experience with urban homesteading, share your story in the comments section below.