PrintUrban Chickens in the Bronx
National Geographic mentions the 13 urban chickens at the Taqwa Community Farm in the Bronx, watched over by senior gardener Abu Talib, and the greater national trend:
City dwellers across the U.S. are adding hens to their yards and gardens, garnering fresh eggs, fertilizer, and community ties, with localities debating and updating their ordinances accordingly.
Urban chickens fell out of favor in the last century because of industrialization and other factors. In the 1990s, though, they enjoyed a renaissance in the local-food-loving Pacific Northwest.
Yesterday, we noted the resurgence of gardening given the economy, and urban chicken coops seem like the next step. For more information on raising chickens, check out urbanchickens.net, which also has a Twitter account (@urbanchickens) and Facebook page.
[via BoingBoing]
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7 Comments:
love seeing this happen.... good for abu talib .... when i grew up in brooklyn in the 50's ... people used to raise pigeons on the roofs of
the tenaments. and people did have chickens, maybe 1 or 2 in the backyards.
pooch at 4:37PM on 03/19/09
no roosters, please. a neighbor got one a few years back and i didn't get a good night's sleep the entire time he had it. also, aren't chickens a vector for a lot of diseases..like avian flu? sorry but i just can't get into the urban livestock thing. gardening makes a lot more sense for everyone involved.
sloppy at 4:58PM on 03/19/09
This sounds great (and I recall my mother mentioning this, from back in her childhood), but today are there any forms or what-have-you that need to be filled up to avoid any regulatory problems? Seems likely that some sort of red tape would have sprung up around keeping rabbits and chickens over the last 50 years or so, the sort of thing one would want to deal with up front (an you'd also have to think to ask about and might take a bit of hunting to discover), instead of learning about it when a difficult neighbour decided to be a nuisance.
mongoose at 5:05PM on 03/19/09
@sloppy: I absolutely agree about the noise.
My last apartment had chickens in the back yard. (This is in Brooklyn.) So loud. Roosters do not just crow at dawn. They crow all the time.
And when the dude who kept them would kill one of them... Hoo! The building would smell like death and rotting for days.
I understand that part of my bad experience is simply the manner in which these chickens were kept, so perhaps that is more the issue of my concern, as opposed to urban chickens across the board.
semarr at 5:34PM on 03/19/09
We keep chickens, but just for eggs, and because we like them. They're actually very fun...when I come home, they come running out to greet me. They're as easy to keep as you can imagine...all they need is some grass, a bit of food (layer's mash if you want eggs), and a warm shelter when it starts to get dark. Also, never keep hens singly...you need at least two and preferably more, as they're very social animals. As a bonus, they will happily rid your garden of snails, slugs and other pests. They're also quite fond of leftovers, especially anything with cheese, but even potato peelings will get at least a nibble.
You can easily keep hens without cockerels; one hen will become the dominant one and boss the others around. We've never kept a cockerel and our little girls are doing fine.
They can be quite noisy, as a word of warning. When one hen lays an egg, she makes a loud squawk which all the other hens repeat. But hens have never expressed any interest in being outside or making noise after dusk or before dawn.
NotAmerican at 3:36AM on 03/20/09
I've been really interested in urban chicken raising lately, but I want to wait until I have an actual house and a yard to raise them in. I was thinking about having my kids take care of them, if I have any. Although I do wonder if killing and eating the chickens once they stop laying eggs would be too traumatizing for little kids. Does anyone here have experience with this?
malice88alice at 3:50PM on 03/20/09
@malice; Layers aren't really good for eating. The meat is very tough and stringy. It's good for soups, stews and pies at best. The point of a layer is that all the protein goes into the egg.
Hens will lay eggs for most of their lives, and layer's mash is very cheap (plus, as I said before, they will take care of leftovers and rid your garden of pests). So why not just let them live out their days in retirement?
The best thing is a small, portable pen (chickens like small enclosed places...you could give them the biggest coop on earth and they'd still crowd in together) with a fenced area for them to roam during the day. They need access to both sun and shade, and a place to have a dust-bath to keep their feathers clean.
You might look at some of the fantastic products Omlet makes:
http://www.omlet.co.uk/products_services/products_services.php
You need a movable pen, or else you get 'scouring' of the grass from the droppings.
I've also found that chickens, ducks and geese all get along very well, and it's tremendous fun when you open the back door in the morning and find them all together in a crowd, waiting to be fed.
NotAmerican at 2:35AM on 03/21/09