SPIRIT APRIL 2011 APRIL 2011 SPIRIT

Backyard Bounty
I vAs A 19-\LA-oLD college student living
in Eugene, Oregon, when I tasted my frst
real egg. Kaydie, one of my housemates, had
brought home a whole tray of them from her
aunts farm and was keeping them hidden,
like an illicit substance or luscious slab of
pie, in the back of the fridge. Would you like
to have one? she beckoned. Theyre noth-
ing like the eggs youre used to. Whatever,
I thought. An eggs an egg.
Boy was I wrong. These, laid by free-roam-
ing fowl with all the access to food, water, and
clean Oregon air they could ever want, were
scales away from the kind I bought down the
block at Safeway, where they came bleach
white and more delicate than grandmas
china. Kaydies were various sizes and shades
of brown (ochre! ecru!), and you practically had
to hit the things with a hammer to get them
open. Inside, both yolk and white were so fresh
I could have subsisted entirely on a diet of
friuatas and soufsincollege.
Seven years later, the people in my home-
town of Portland have come down with
chicken fevereven the mayor keeps a fock of
healthier: A 2007 study by Mother EarthNews
confrmed that pasture-raised hens who are
free to forage for bugs, worms, grass, and
leaves produce eggs with four to six times the
vitamin D and a third less cholesterol as their
mass-market counterparts.
When youre raising chickens, the acces-
sorizing opportunities are endless. For three
dollars you can download an iPhone app called
Pickin Chicken that will help you determine
which breed to buy, from Freedom Ranger to
Faverolles. There are motorized portals that
keep birds in and raccoons out. Backyard
Poultry magazine even sells T-shirts that read,
Have You Hugged Your Chicken Today?
But what do you really need?
The average family of four starts their fock
with three hens, which together lay about
a dozen eggs a week, says Robert Liu, who
co-owns Portlands Urban Farm Store and
co-wrote the just-released book, AChicken
inEveryYard, with his wife Hannah. The
startup cost is about $75 for the chicks and the
equipment to brood (or raise) them indoors
until theyre fully feathered. According to
Liu, the feed cost for three birds averages $10 to
$20 a month. The largest expense is the coop,
but you can build one yourself for less than
$100. Best of all, the focks are more than food-
producing poultry. Theyre pets.
Id probably keep my chickens even if
they stopped laying eggs, says Katy Skinner,
the Yacolt, Washington-based creator of
TheCityChicken.com. They eat every last food
scrap, and they make manure for my garden.
So even in winter when the egg laying slows
down, my hens are still quite useful.
Liu likes to tell tales of the devoted chicken
keepers hes met. One customer became so
auached to her birds that she paid $1,500 for a
hysterectomy when her hen had an impacted
egg, he says. The chicken cost four dollars!
Once youre set on shepherding your own
fock, confrm that local laws are in your favor.
In Portland youre allowed three hens (no
roostersneighbors are annoying enough).
You can have as many as you want in
Minneapolis, provided you get consent from
80 percent of your neighbors; in Nashville,
theyre allowed if penned (no fowl at large,
the law states). Out of sheer curiosity, I call
3-1-1, New York Citys ask-anything helpline.
A woman named Gloria picks up and isnt at
all befuddled when I ask her if raising chick-
ens in your apartment is legal in the fve
boroughs. Per the New York City Department
of Health and Mental Hygiene, Its okay as
long as theyre hens, Baby, she says.
Looking out my window, I spy a patch of
earth just big enough for a coop, and visions of
Speckled Sussex hens dance before my eyes.
Id name them Eenie, Meenie, Miney, and Moe.
Id rise at dawn to toss them handfuls of grain,
then ofer their eggs to my neighbors, people on
the subway. I fip open my to-do list. Note: Call
the Super; entice him with a glorious farmers
market egg; ask if I can raise my happy hens on
the empty plot of farmland below.

KathrynOShea-Evans work has beenseenin
Portland Monthly, Travel + Leisure, and Good.
Raising hens at home?
Eggcellent! BY KATHRYN O SHEAEVANS
egg-laying hens. Last year in the seventh
annual Tour de Coops, poultry lovers could
visit 25 of the citys most eye-popping hen
houses. One of them elicited comparisons
to the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright;
another was built of tongue-in-groove cedar
and festooned with brass door handles from
a 1920s British couage. I knew the trend was
in full force when two of my auntspreuy,
put-together women youd never picture don-
ning cutofs and shoveling manurecreated
their own coops and adopted winged inhabit-
ants with names like Thelma and Louise.
According to Rob Ludlow, creator of
BackYardChickens.com and co-author of
RaisingChickens for Dummies, the trend is
nationwide and growing rapidly. Our online
forum started in January 2007 with about 50
members, he says. Now we have 75,000, and
a hundred more joining every day. Many are
rearing poultry to join the slow-food move-
ment; others do it because they can all but
guarantee food safety in the wake of the 2010
salmonella outbreak. But beyond the threat
of disease, home-grown eggs are just plain