Who called me chicken?, originally uploaded by mselderhuis.
I took the kids to a farm the other day to pick pumpkins and watched as the strangest thing happened. All of the stress of school, sports, sibling rivalry melted away as they cracked corn, fed it to the animals, and played on the hay bales.
It struck me that we need a little more ACTUAL farm in our lives.
So I am looking into raising a chicken or two. Naturally this led me to research the two most important aspects of raising livestock:
1. How to keep them from dying
2. Is there a way to make their living quarters stylish?
There are loads of sites that offer great information on raising chickens at your home. Here are a couple that I like:
As for stylish chicken housing, I had to dig a little deeper.
This image comes from a Majordomo post on a prefab modern chick coop.
Here is the only decent (not old, tumble-down farm) chicken coop that I could find commercially:
It comes from Ideas4pets in the UK and costs $170. With a little white paint and maybe a red metal roof it might look OK. I would probably paint the door a bright color and see it I can find a small lamp to modernize it a bit.
What I am really looking for is more like a scaled-down version of this:
This one comes from a post on Minordetails.com.
3 responses so far ↓
1 admin // Oct 27, 2008 at 3:21 pm
I just got off of the phone with the Lafayette, CA Planning Department. It seems that even though the town is officially considered “semi-rural,” you need to get a variance to have any livestock (including chickens) on a lot that is smaller than 50,000 sft.
It seems that in these locovore times, it might be a good idea to change that rule.
2 Fancy // Oct 28, 2008 at 8:29 am
Thank you for taking the time to look for hip chicken coops. Ha!! I love it…
3 ek // Nov 1, 2008 at 6:53 pm
No chickens allowed here in Washington, DC either. If that law is ever updated, here’s a nice homebuilt coop that could serve as inspiration.
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