In the name of urban farming, there were a lot of ways BJ Hedahl could have transformed her spacious, fenced backyard in Seattle: putting in an organic garden, a beehive or a chicken coop, maybe.

But Hedahl wanted ducks. Or rather duck eggs -richer, denser, with yolks bigger than your chicken variety, she said.

Here on a recent afternoon were her four ducks, hopping out of the kiddie wading pool in the middle of her yard, each webfoot capable of producing about 300 eggs every year.

That's a lot of quiche.

But these ducks aren't a lot of work, she said. "They're lower maintenance than chickens and I think [the eggs] taste better." Hedahl now runs workshops showing Seattleites how to raise ducks in their yards.
These days, around Seattle you can find just about every conceivable workshop related to urban farming. The slow-food, eat-local movement has spurred hordes of city slickers to adopt some small measure of homestead mentality into their daily life.

Workshops are packed.

The nonprofit Seattle Tilth, which offers the widest range of city farming know-how workshops in Western Washington, reports record attendance in recent years. Chickenraising courses have wait lists. Sessions on beekeeping for honey fill quickly. The group's annual summer self-guided tour of chicken coops around Seattle has expanded to include homes with bees, ducks and goats.
The widespread interest has led Seattle Tilth to diversify its class offerings to include raising ducks and goats.
Raising urban dairy goats, which was previously rare (and before 2007 illegal) in Seattle, has become trendy here and in other parts of the country.

Three years ago, Jennie Grant, who teaches the dairy-goat workshop at Tilth's Wallingford, Washington, headquarters, convinced Seattle's city government to allow homeowners to raise miniature (45 kilograms or lighter), dehorned goats.

Urban farmers consider goats to be "the city cow," a smaller milk producer that needs no more yard space than a typical dog.

Grant's class is more popular with people who are curious about getting fresh milk to make cheese and yogurt. She tells potential goat owners to buy a breed that's quiet. Erect a 1.5-metre fence, build a shed and be prepared to milk day and night.

Grant's backyard features seven chickens, two goats and a view of Lake Washington. With the eggs and the goat milk, that's pretty much all you need for a soufflé, she said.

Her goats each can produce around a gallon a day. Grant has it on her oatmeal, her husband pours it over cold cereal and her 10-year-old son drinks it straight. The surplus is given to neighbours or made into chevre and mozzarella. It makes for a fine goat-cheese pizza with tomatoes and caramelized onions, she said.
How does it taste? Clean and rich, similar to whole milk from a cow, with none of the awful tangy or gamy flavour that you can get from the goat's milk on grocery shelves.

Grant said her other goat, Snowflake, produces an even richer milk. "It's like drinking half-andhalf."
For Hedahl, raising ducks has involved a bit of trial and error since there weren't many local duck owners to turn to for advice. An early mistake was unwittingly buying a breed that quacked loudly. That didn't win her any fans among neighbours.

She now has two each of the khaki Campbell and Indian runner breeds -a lot quieter, said Hedahl, who recently started teaching City Ducks 101, a class with the subtitle, Learn how to get started, raising your very own team of ducks -no lake required.

She's perplexed that chicken coops are popping up all over Seattle yet many people still look at raising ducks like it's some kind of freak show. "We live in wet, rainy Seattle. It's ideal for ducks."