Adventures of an urban homesteader growing greens, preserving the harvest and tending a backyard barnyard
I hate to even write this post… It was a quiet Thursday afternoon and I was working from home, getting tons of stuff done. No distractions from the office, no phone calls, no interruptions. Just the soft clucking of the hens. Oh, and a nice, long crow. I heard the crow loud and clear. I knew it was a crow, but it wasn’t the full
The chickens are of the age where they are leaving their adolescence and entering adulthood. The major sign will be the day we either discover an egg in the nesting box or hear a crow from the coop. Just to update you, neither has taken place with the three younger chickens. It has been five months though now, so any day I expect to find
The 2008 Tour de Coops was last Saturday and we estimate somewhere between 125-150 people came through our yard from 11:00 am to 3:00 pm. By the end, I felt like I was slurring my words from talking so much that day. I had my “chicken-experience-in-a-nutshell” down to about two minutes. As you may recall, I rebuilt my chicken coop this past Spring. The major
It’s that time of year again: Portland’s 5th Annual Tour de Coops. I am very excited to be one of the coops on the tour this year! There are about 18 total coops on the tour, stretching to the north and south corners on the east side of Portland. There will even be an organized bike tour of the coops, although I doubt they will
Last Sunday at the Lents International Farmer’s Market, they had a guest speaker come to talk about bee-keeping in the city. This has been something I have been curious about for some time, but I was never really sure if you could do that in the city. To answer that question, yes you can keep bees in the city. The speaker was a man name
In a flurry of adventurous ambition, I volunteered to help out at a few different events this summer. There was the Foster-Powell (Fo-Po) Garden Tour. Then I signed up for the Lents Farmer’s Market. And finally the 5th Annual Tour de Coops. All of these are events here in Portland. The Fo-Po Garden Tour was a fun, smaller event. A few people came through the
We did the deed, and I can now say I am no longer just a city girl, not yet a country woman. After much thought, we decided to put an end to Ed’s life. It’s possible I could have found a farm somewhere looking for a lone rooster, but I guess I wanted to save that rooster opening for another urban family that didn’t feel
Although I consider myself an early-riser, to me that means I get up sometime after 7:30am. I so dislike getting up in the wee hours that I once considered whether I really wanted to go to Germany when my flight required I be at the airport at 4:00am. In the end I went, but there was a large amount of mumbling complaints and requests for
We knew this moment was coming: the crow heard throughout the house. There we were: Jay, myself, my sister Anne, my nephew Evan. We had spent a long morning together, picking fresh produce from the garden to make a big family breakfast. Potatoes were roasted with an assortment of home grown herbs. We snipped collards, spinach, beet leaves, and swiss chard from the vegetable beds
