Inner City Farmer

[First, a note: I embarked upon this quest to attain complete self-sufficiency soon after I bought my house in Austin in July, 2006, but only now have I begun to write about my experiences. It’s going to take me a while to catch you up to speed. Please indulge me….]

In his book The Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live It, John Seymour, leader of the self-sufficiency movement in Britain, advocated making a cow the centerpiece of one’s farm. Unfortunately, as celebrated as that animal remains in Texas and as liberal as Austin seems to be on the subject of raising livestock, cattle are still not allowed within the city limits. So I decided to start with chickens instead.

It was a smart choice. Chickens are easy to maintain; they produce incredible fertilizer (provided their nitrate-rich manure is allowed to cure for several months first); they produce, on nearly a daily basis, one of nature’s best sources of protein in perfectly biodegradable packaging; and if one of them happens to die it makes deciding what’s for dinner oh-so easy. But you don’t just buy a couple chicks and throw them into your backyard. Like every other aspect in the effort to be self-sufficient, raising chickens is a process.

The first thing you need to do, well before you obtain the chickens themselves, is make them a home. As excited as I was about the prospect of raising chickens after I bought my house in 2006, I had no desire to run to Home Depot and buy hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars worth of materials to build a chicken house. Because they’re chickens, I was quite sure they didn’t care about the quality of the materials, only that they provided adequate shelter, so I waited until I happened upon a free source of wood. In one of those moments that make you feel like the world’s got your back, a woman I met at a kid’s birthday party casually mentioned the huge pile of wood sitting in her front yard and suggested I come by and take as much as I wanted. I knocked on her front door the very next day.

It was a classic win-win-win situation: she was getting rid of the unsightly mess in her front yard, I was acquiring enough wood to finish my entire project, and we were both keeping this enormous pile of materials out of the local landfill. The only things I needed to buy in order to build the chicken coop were a couple of hinges for the door and a roll of chicken wire (which, despite the name, is actually not the best material for the job as it doesn’t present much of a challenge to determined predators with very sharp teeth).

Spending no more than a couple hours a day, I erected a structure that looked hopelessly makeshift, but was actually incredibly sturdy and functional. No animal has ever gnawed through the chicken wire that wraps the enclosure nor has one ever dug beneath it. It helped that I buried the wire about eight inches beneath the ground and then, for good measure, placed cinder blocks all the way around the base of the enclosure. Even if an animal were to get through this Alcatraz-like enclosure, it would be faced with the far more difficult task of getting into the chickens’ house. When the house’s door and windows are closed and latched, the structure becomes nearly impenetrable.

During the day I usually leave both doors (the one to the enclosure and the one to the house) open, and the chickens are free to roam about the yard and do what chickens do, eat bugs and roll in the dirt and crap in places you can be sure you’re going to step at some point. Like clockwork they return to their house in the evening just as the sun is falling below the horizon.

All the work I spent at the beginning of this process, building a sturdy house within an impenetrable enclosure, has made my life much easier now. Whenever I have to go out of town for a weekend and no one is around to feed my chickens, I simply fill up their feeder and water bottle and leave the door to their house open and the door to the enclosure shut. That way they can huddle inside their house if it rains as well as roost inside it at night, but they can still be outside all day and no predators can get to them. A year and a half later, this arrangement is still working beautifully.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 at 3:34 pm and is filed under Chickens. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.