An interview with Chickens in the City
This article was posted on May 13 2008
Raleigh’s city chicken owners invite you into their backyards for a first-hand look at keeping chickens in an urban environment. Discover the variety of breeds that might be nesting in your neighborhood, learn about raising chickens, and see how families integrate chickens into their gardening practices. In addition, you’ll be impressed by the ingenious coops that can be devised to shelter these feathered pets.
For information on where the tour stops and how to get tickets, click here.
Did you know there was such a thing as urban chickens? Could you kill a chicken you raised and eat it (I’m not saying thats what these folks do, I’m just curious)?
I just blogged about this earlier today! I am super excited about the tour and hopefully by the end of summer, we’ll have our own egg-laying fowl. We probably won’t use them for their meat, just the eggs. I can’t wait!
Wow, that was a lot of puns for a little story.
This is awesome. I soon as I saw this I instantly thought of my time in Key West where they have a well renown population of wild chickens and roosters in an “urban” environment.
Apparently the town has quite a controversy over them
I’ve been to this the last couple years. It is a real kick, and the crowds are huge. One of the first city chickeners lives down the street from me. I have a hunch that photo was taken in front of her house.
Your chicken commentary video is hilarious!
) As you know, I grew up in farm country, and we raised chickens for awhile. The eggs were fantastic, but we waited too long to butcher some of the chickens, so the meat was pretty tough.
Are you serious about the meat being pretty tough? I guess I don’t know much about the proper waiting period to butcher a chicken. Was it weird eating chickens that you watched from chickhood to adulthood?
I raised chickens when I was a youngin’ in Canada … “meat” birds and “laying” birds are very different breeds, and I’d think an older laying bird wouldn’t make for very tasty meat. If I remember correctly, we only kept meat birds for four months or so … layers would stay in our flock for years.
I thought the video was great! Does the chicken coop smell bad? I used to drive by one outside of columbia that made me gag but it was huge. Still I wouldn’t want to be down wind in that neighborhood.
Glad you enjoyed the video. Nope, it doesn’t smell. It’s very clean and the chickens are very friendly.
Wow, there’s tours round your neigbours gardens who keep chickens!
We’ve recently started on our chicken keeping adventure. We now have 4 Isa Brown chickens, which hopefully will start laying in a few weeks time.
There’s a huge interest in keeping chickens in the UK, mostly fueled by the recent celebrity chef campaigns, trying to get people to stop buying battery farm eggs and go organic instead.
Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s ‘Chicken Out’ programme was the final straw…
Other plus points if you’re a gardener is that the chickens keep the garden pests in check. Slugs now have a number one enemy!
Oh and they produce quite a lot of ‘poo’, so there’s always fresh ‘vegetable’ matter to add to you compost heap… LOL!
Chicken Keeping
[...] backyard chicken coop tour date has been set. If you’ve never heard of this event before, it’s definitely worth checking out. Basically, you can see how a bunch of city folk have incorporated live chickens into their [...]