Visit Dallas urban poultry coops

Damon Petr is not a vampire, but he does his best work at night. Wearing one of seven pairs of headlamps, Petr does his carpentry, vegetable gardening, chicken husbandry and outdoor maintenance in the dark.

You can see the remarkable results of his nocturnal pursuits Sunday at the second annual Peep at the Coops tour in East Dallas. Not only does he have a neat, roomy habitat for nine hens that he constructed with a childhood friend from recycled materials, he also has a substantial kitchen garden full of thriving tomatoes, potatoes, greens, herbs and berries.

Petr explains he gets most of his chores done when the rest of the neighborhood is asleep because he runs his home-based business during the day and takes care of his 4-year-old daughter, Zoë, when she is not in nursery school.

“I really can’t get that quiet alone time until Zoë goes to sleep,” says the Dallas native, 39. “I couldn’t garden” without the headlamp. He has multiple sets, so he is never without illumination if he misplaces one. He says they are used more frequently by fishermen, hunters and campers so they can work in the dark hands-free. He buys his supply at Whole Earth Provision and REI.

The entrepreneur (Petr founded Allied Delivery with his mother 17 years ago) enthusiastically proselytizes sustainability at the consumer level. He has been building his urban farm, as he calls it, for five years. He decided to take part in the coop tour in hopes of persuading visitors how much pleasure can be built into a backyard.

“I hear people say they’re bored, there’s nothing to do, and they have a whole backyard,” Petr says. “People live their entire lives without getting their hands dirty. Some people can live and die and never grow a single thing they ate.

“But times are changing. I get chills just thinking about it,” and Petr shows the goose bumps on his forearms. “This is not a fad — the chickens, the vegetable gardening. I slowly see a trend of people letting go of the green yards. The only way I see that we can sustainably grow is to ditch the grass.”

Petr’s backyard is entirely turned over to recreation and raising food. It receives a full day of sun, mandatory for a bountiful harvest. The pair of patio umbrellas, in fact, are not used to shade lounging humans but to protect 4-foot-tall tomato plants and their fruit from being scalded by the harsh sun later in the season.

“This is going to be the very best tomato year, ever,” Petr proclaims.

Petr’s interest in his family’s health ignited his interest in backyard vegetables, including growing foods naturally, without chemicals, and knowing where food comes from. He also is the sort who responds viscerally to the wonders of nature. The goose bumps returned when he talked about the most beautiful waterway in Texas (the Devils River in South Texas) and the first time a hummingbird visited the garden, hovering within inches of his face and staring into his eyes.

It is no surprise, therefore, that the backyard hens are family pets, all named. The coop is large and tidy, with no odor. It is designed so the hens have access to both sun and shade. Petr’s many “healthy” friends save the pulp and skins from daily juicing for the hens, which augments chicken scratch and layer pellets. Four-year-old Zoë collects grubs in a jar as her father unearths them while working the soil.

He and his carpenter friend also built a 23-foot tunnel of wood and hardware cloth to connect the coop to an even bigger exercise area in the side yard. The structure provides the chickens with plenty of space to scratch for bugs and exercise, but it protects Petr’s vegetables from voracious hens.

With the addition of a seeping water feature built from landscape boulders, a hogwire fence on the back property line to support blackberry brambles, a beehive and a three-bin compost station made of the same rough cedar as the coop, Petr is in the final stage of his backyard’s transformation. The last feature is a hand-built pizza oven made of cobb, an ancient building material consisting of sawdust, clay, straw and water. Cobb is fireproof and inexpensive.

Petr expects to be eating oven-to-table, thin-crust pizzas flavored with homegrown vegetables and just-snipped herbs by autumn.

“It seems so right,” he says of his lifestyle. “It’s not for everybody, but it’s the way I want to live.”