Indianapolis may be behind other cities in new trends, but sometimes we catch up.
Food trucks, bike paths -- they took a while, but . . . check.
Now Indy's neighborhoods are becoming hamlets for urban chickens, flocks of a half-dozen or so birds that hunt and peck within the city limits, in areas with sidewalks and stoplights.
It's like "Green Acres" -- only inverted.
One would be hard-pressed to find a greener hobby: The backyard chicken is the pet equivalent of the Toyota Prius.
The chickens sleep on "roosts" in "coops" built in backyards, next to driveways; they give up uneven, all-natural eggs to their sustainability-happy owners.
It's impossible to say how many such folk there are here, but their numbers clearly are growing. On Sunday, Indianapolis will host its first organized tour of backyard chicken coops, a sort of benchmark. More than 100 people have signed up.
Backyard chickens -- mail-order chicks can be obtained in small quantities for the price of a decent hamburger -- are free to walk around and take dust baths at will, as opposed to enduring the caged-up squalor of industrial chicken farms. Their manure makes for great composting; and their eggs couldn't possibly be any more local -- zero fossil fuel is required to transport them from backyard through kitchen door.
Besides, "chickens are fun," says Maggie Goeglein, who has an NPR sticker on the rear window of her subcompact Honda and is working on a degree in Earth literacy from Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College. "They're not the brightest animals, but they have personality."
Goeglein has four, and as she enters her backyard in the Rocky Ripple neighborhood, they rush her. She smiles. She gives the chickens a fresh tomato and greets them by name.
"If I had a meat flock, I wouldn't name them," she says.
Betty, Roxanne, Ramona and Fern, like most backyard chickens, are being kept for their eggs, which, unlike the uniform supermarket eggs, come in various sizes and shades. Hens lay about one a day. Goeglein and her fiance, Jason Hanna, either eat the eggs or give them away to impressed friends and neighbors.
"The yokes are orange, not yellow," Goeglein notes, "and the egg white has more consistency. They just taste really eggy."
Backyard chickens go back to the Great Depression but petered out with prosperity. The current trend surfaced, as part of the global sustainability movement, five or six years ago, said Paul Shapiro of the Humane Society of the United States.
Today there are backyard chickens even in New York. (Had urban chickens been in vogue in the 1960s, is it possible Oliver Wendell Douglas would have elected not to drag that dingbat wife of his out to the country? Discuss.)
World chaos may have something to do with the backyard chicken escalation. "Whenever the economy is bad, people look more to self-reliance," says Elaine Belanger, editor of Backyard Poultry Magazine. (When Belanger's father-in-law discontinued the bi-monthly journal, in 1982, it had 4,000 subscribers; Belanger re-launched it in 2006, and today its circulation is 85,000).
Madison, Wis., was an early hotbed. Madison, the college town's college town, may have hosted the first Chicken Coop Tour, which is like a garden tour except for chicken coops. That was in 2005.
A coop tour is a sign a city has arrived, backyard chicken-wise. Seattle has one, as does Bend, Ore., and Portland.
But so do Salt Lake City, Pittsburgh and many other not-that-cool cities.
2011年9月15日星期四
2011年3月22日星期二
The Chicken Coop King
Ray Cooper is not the first small businessman to struggle to persuade retailers to grant him space for his unique product. An artisan craftsman of full-sized chicken coops made from recycled chicken barns, many of them a hundred years old, each of Cooper's coops requires a floor space equivalent of a California King-sized bed.
In other words, they are big, big coops. Think mini-van. Think tree house. Think, where do you put it?
"No, it wasn't easy at first," says the 52-year-old Cooper. "But then RiverTown gave me a chance and pretty quick we had a day when we sold two."
Cooper is an eco-Renaissance man who has dedicated himself to sustainable practices like keeping egg-laying hens. A soft spoken, yet energetic conversationalist, Cooper is passionate about recycling. He has recently become a vegetarian, lives within his means, hikes instead of driving when he can and is passing on his creative skills to his 22-year-old son and assistant, Kevin Cooper.
He doesn't want to be the Henry Ford of chicken coops, he says. Instead he wants to be a Green Michelangelo, rejecting staples altogether, taking the time to use screws instead of nails, and searching garage sales and thrift stores for vintage painted wood chickens to decorate the front doors.
He is also pack-ratting small stained glass windows that add sparkle, distinguishing these coops as rustic jewel boxes of barnyards.
"The windows can be a challenge because you don't find them small and when you do, you don't find them cheap," said Cooper with a grin.
A former handyman for his family's real estate business and milk truck driver, Cooper hopes to hone his chicken coop model, which maximizes the eaves for nest boxes and has removable wire grid floors, into the eco-Cadillac of coops.
They'll never be cheap, he says. But they'll be worth the cost to people who understand the challenges of lovingly collecting and rehabbing old, thick and wide redwood lumber. Cooper figures if he pays himself and his son $10 to $20 an hour, he'll be happy. That means he'll have to charge up to $1,000 a piece for the one or two coops he can fabricate each month in a small, cramped barn on a hill overlooking the Petaluma Outlets.
"I'm making them all from hundred-year-old, inch thick redwood, which I took down myself. These old barns lasted a hundred years and the coops will last another hundred years," he said.
He's so busy and entrenched in his creative labors, that he's yet to brand his coops. If you ask the folks at RiverTown who makes the coops, they'll write Cooper's name and phone number on your sales slip.
"Everyone is going back to the land and old ways. Chickens have never been more popular. More and more people are discovering them. If I can do work I'm passionate about and receive the fruits of my own labors? That's all I can ask," Cooper says.
In other words, they are big, big coops. Think mini-van. Think tree house. Think, where do you put it?
"No, it wasn't easy at first," says the 52-year-old Cooper. "But then RiverTown gave me a chance and pretty quick we had a day when we sold two."
Cooper is an eco-Renaissance man who has dedicated himself to sustainable practices like keeping egg-laying hens. A soft spoken, yet energetic conversationalist, Cooper is passionate about recycling. He has recently become a vegetarian, lives within his means, hikes instead of driving when he can and is passing on his creative skills to his 22-year-old son and assistant, Kevin Cooper.
He doesn't want to be the Henry Ford of chicken coops, he says. Instead he wants to be a Green Michelangelo, rejecting staples altogether, taking the time to use screws instead of nails, and searching garage sales and thrift stores for vintage painted wood chickens to decorate the front doors.
He is also pack-ratting small stained glass windows that add sparkle, distinguishing these coops as rustic jewel boxes of barnyards.
"The windows can be a challenge because you don't find them small and when you do, you don't find them cheap," said Cooper with a grin.
A former handyman for his family's real estate business and milk truck driver, Cooper hopes to hone his chicken coop model, which maximizes the eaves for nest boxes and has removable wire grid floors, into the eco-Cadillac of coops.
They'll never be cheap, he says. But they'll be worth the cost to people who understand the challenges of lovingly collecting and rehabbing old, thick and wide redwood lumber. Cooper figures if he pays himself and his son $10 to $20 an hour, he'll be happy. That means he'll have to charge up to $1,000 a piece for the one or two coops he can fabricate each month in a small, cramped barn on a hill overlooking the Petaluma Outlets.
"I'm making them all from hundred-year-old, inch thick redwood, which I took down myself. These old barns lasted a hundred years and the coops will last another hundred years," he said.
He's so busy and entrenched in his creative labors, that he's yet to brand his coops. If you ask the folks at RiverTown who makes the coops, they'll write Cooper's name and phone number on your sales slip.
"Everyone is going back to the land and old ways. Chickens have never been more popular. More and more people are discovering them. If I can do work I'm passionate about and receive the fruits of my own labors? That's all I can ask," Cooper says.
订阅：
博文 (Atom)