Our Chickens in Suburbia

In the two years between the time we first decided to move to a farm and our actual move, we did what we could to experiment. (Which, in retrospect, wasn't a whole lot.)

Phil composted. He LOVED it: turning kitchen scraps into humus. It's like magic. Or, as some ego-ag people say, it's alchemy!

I tried to garden. I dug up two raised beds in our front yard (when a neighbor came by to ask what we were doing, I said, "I'm just burying a body," and he got such a queer look on his face! But the two mounds did look rather like burial plots). I grew some tomatoes from seed, and had a good crop of cilantro and lettuce. A few radishes and some flowers.

We bought a few egg layer hens from a friend.

And we raised two batches of broiler chicks, from babies to processed meat in the freezer.

Phil wished we had started with chickens when we first moved into the neighborhood. We actually met our neighbors! When we were outside moving the chickens, the neighbors would stop by to talk to us. Most couldn't believe it was legal to have chickens in suburbia! Phil had made a rectangular pen, framed in wood with chicken netting for the sides, and a corrugated aluminum top, and we marched the chickens twice a day around the small yard.

Our grass never looked better.

We'd catch neighbors bringing their toddlers over to see our birds. We'd talk about the different colors of eggs, about the feed requirements, about the personalities.

Our neighbor across the street called one day and asked why the chicken crossed the road. (We always did have one persistent hen that liked to explore.)

We had a few traumatic moments. When we first moved our beautiful chicks outside, they were so happy to scratch and eat. But the first time we moved them, we didn't know what we were doing, and ran our pen over two of them. They were so tiny, and so injured. We needed to put them down, in their fluff and beauty. But none of the methods we'd read about worked. Those little birds were so persistently alive. Phil and I would screw our courage to the sticking place, and try to kill these trusting, injured chicks. Several times over.

Even now I think we've done nothing more horrific. I was so thankful we were still close to my parents. We went down and verbally processed.

If we hadn't felt truly called, I think we'd been done right then. I'm a suburban girl! I have to lie down when having a blood sample taken, lest I pass out.

And then we did chicken processing. We didn't actually check the Boulder codes to know if that was legal, but did the first batch at a friend's house, and the second batch in our backyard. The first bird we actually had to kill was really emotionally tough. There is a distance between knowing that my food comes from animals, and killing those animals myself.

But we did it. It wasn't easy or pleasant, but we did it. Our first batch had about a 50% success rate, from chicks to chickens.

The second batch of chicks came during a freak cold snap. Rather than vigorous, happily cheeping chicks, we opened to box to find several dead chicks. We lost more almost every day. Maybe chicken pneumonia, acquired from the initial chill as babies? We had ordered about 30, and by the time we came to process, we had only about 15 birds.

As we raise our first batch of broilers here in Virginia, I am so thankful I've dealt with some of the challenges of chick raising already.

One chick came to us ill in appearance, and it died today. Fifty-one broilers, and Tux, remain.