Urban Chickens

Some of you may be wondering about urban chickens since the end of my post on Monday afternoon alluded to a future post. Well now that I have built suspense for a day without posting I am ready to share about urban chickens. To begin with I will share this article from the Seattle Times about what is like to be a "City Chicken" in Seattle. There are some great pictures of extensive coops and overall a great article about urban chicken life. Seattle Tilth, a website featured in one of Monday's blog entries offers a chicken coop tour for those interested in physically exploring this topic further and this takes place in July.

A brief internet search about urban chickens will yield a number of websites. One of the first to come up will be urbanchickens.org and they have a fun easy to navigate site on the subject. They mention some benefits of maintaining urban chickens as providing a local source of protein (eggs), a source of fertilizer for gardening, pest control and that it can be very fun! Their resources page is AWESOME as it has resources located in different cities across the country, general information and supply resources as well. This site is based in Albuquerque, New Mexico but they are chicken proponents for other places as well. They have website sections on caring for chickens, chicken coops, recipes & crafts and several other topics.

On the Seattle Urban Farm Company website, which was featured in Monday's blog entry, there is information on the local ordinance for Seattle governing urban livestock, including chickens. Currently the limit per property is 3 chickens but the Seattle Department of Planning and Development is proposing a code change that will increase the number allowed from 3 to 8 chickens among a few other proposed changes regarding urban agriculture.