Chickens!

Got this NYTimes article on the growing popularity of raising chickens in the backyard passed on by my pal Adam S down in Portland. As many of you know, Mrs. F and I have been planning a chicken coop for too long. But the pieces of the puzzle are finally starting to be put into place, with the first phase--the three-tier compost bin--now under construction. (You can download the PDF plans to see this monstrosity at Seattle Tilth.) Anyhoo, here are a couple of the key grafs from the NYT story:

Mr. and Ms. Bove, who moved early in their marriage from Staten Island to semirural Frankford Township in New Jersey, have 4 children and 24 chickens. They are among a growing number of exurban and suburban Americans who keep the birds not for commercial reasons but as pets, family egg producers, show animals or some combination. The development has been noted by agriculture experts, hatchery owners and chicken-supply sellers across the country, and has been attributed variously to the rise in popularity of organic foods, the desire of parents to expose their children to nature and the influence of Martha Stewart, who has featured "fancy" chickens like the ones at the fair in her magazine and on television. "We have seen a growth in the urban counties and surrounding areas," said Bud Wood, an owner of the Murray McMurray Hatchery in Webster City, Iowa, the country's largest supplier of two-day-old chicks. In the past, he said, sales to areas where the buyers are likely to be amateur keepers, like cities and towns, were too few and sporadic to keep track of, but he estimated that amateurs are now buying 1,000 of his chicks a week. Ric Ashcraft, the secretary and treasurer of the American Poultry Association, originally founded for commercial growers, said the organization's membership had tripled in five years, to 12,000. More than half of the members' birds are bantams, smaller heirloom-breed chickens that lay small eggs and are not raised for meat, suggesting that many or most of the organization's members may now be amateurs.