Notes from the garden: chicken raising

Hello, hello! Long time no write. There is much to write about with the garden, so I'm going to split up the posts by topic.

We got 4 chickens at my house in July. They're Isa Brown hybrid breed chickens, bred for egg laying. Each of the chickens had their own personality. The littlest chicken, whom I call Henrietta Lacks after the African American woman whose cancer cells became the first human cells to grow in-vitro, is the most curious and unafraid of people. The two alphas push everyone else out of their way to the food and occasionally like digging up the seedlings that I plant in the garden. The light colored one has the most distinctive personality - her name is Queen and she is by far the pickiest of the lot. She is last to emerge from the coop every morning, walking daintily on the board down while everyone else crashes out in search of food. When she eats sticky food like banana or apple, she'll wipe her beak against the ground or board. And she is always the least tempted by what I give her.

Chickens enjoying some food scraps

Within a week or two of arriving at their new coop, they started laying eggs of a lovely pink shade. It was really great to have fresh free range eggs on hand. Whatever you've heard about free range and organic food, trust me when I say that there's a HUGE difference between free range and non-free range eggs. Free range eggs are much yellower in color and firmer in shape, and when you cook up scrambled eggs, they actually fill you up.

Eggs, eggs, eggs!

Taking care of chickens is like taking care of any other pet. I wake up at 7:00am every morning because the chickens start making hungry noises and demand to be fed RIGHT THIS INSTANT. Sleepy eyed, I drag yourself out of bed to pour feed into their bowls and to watch them peck at their favorite seeds, leaving the ones they don't like at the bottom because of course every chicken has their favorite foods. After I've properly waken up and gotten breakfast, the chickens have finished eating what they will of the feed and start cooing for more food. So I go out to the garden again and start pulling some greens for them. Make sure to grab the broccoli leaves and not the comfrey, even though it's known as chicken fodder, because the ladies have a taste for vegetable leaves.

The chickens had early on associated the appearance of humans with food, so they always without fail run up to the fence and coo excessively anytime one of us returns home. I usually stop to wander through the garden and pull out some weeds to give to them to eat. Chickens also have a love of watermelon, bell pepper seeds, rice, bread, and chopped up garlic. Feeding them is a chore, but it's a fun chore (as opposed to cleaning up the coop, which is less than fun).

Chickens looking very hopefully for a sign of food

I've only had chickens for 5 months, but it's been a great experience to be a chicken farmer. Sadly, we have to give our chickens away because we're about to move house. But I'm looking forward to when I can own some land and start raising chickens again.

Goodbye, Queen! I'll miss you!

Birke Baehr: What's wrong with our food system

This kid is 11 and he's talking about organic farming and the local movement, stuff I never even thought about until college! Man, I wish I had his oral presentation skills at his age! This is what the world needs, more kids like him. That being said, I wouldn't be as quick to dismiss genetically engineered food as he. Genetic alterations happen naturally (think transposable genetic elements) and having some genetic strains that are more drought tolerant will definitely be useful in the future. The problem with such GM food is decreasing the genetic diversity and not having the whole pool of diversity to go back to if something happens (ie flood happens and you don't have any genetic strains that survive better under very wet conditions). And of course, there's always the possibility of introducing a combination of genetic material into the ecosystem that reacts poorly.

Rough Guide to Community Energy

Rough Guides, a world travel guidebook company, and M&S has recently come out with a free book on community energy. This book, Rough Guide to Community Energy, brings together resources and advice about creating sustainability in local communities through citizen action.

It's often been said that individual action is too small to make a difference and government action is too slow to change anything, but communities are the right scale to get the movement going. For anyone who's interested in starting a community group to tackle climate change or solar energy, but doesn't know where to start, this book provides a lot of cool case studies from the UK and many a practical advice on getting a project off the ground. The guide only covers energy issues and only draws from successful models from one geographic region, so there's a lot more out there that's possible, but it's a good starting point.

The book is available for download free on the website here.

Gardening in small spaces

If you have a balcony, courtyard or small backyard and want to make the most of it, come and learn how to create an inviting oasis at a FREE two hour workshop to see the latest for gardening in small spaces.

When: 6.30pm to 8.30pm, Wednesday 30 May 2012

Where: Blue Room, Level 1 Melbourne Multicultural Hub, 506 Elizabeth Street (opposite Queen Victoria Market), Melbourne

Bookings: Entry is free but bookings are required via Healthy Habitat.

Transforming green spaces

My recent project with designing artwork for two tram stops in Melbourne's inner city has gotten me into the idea of transforming public spaces into new things. Public spaces ought to bring a sense of community, so projects that can provoke this, especially unexpectedly, are projects that I love getting involved in.

Here are two great examples of how local communities have taken empty public space and turned them into green spaces.

The Underground Railroad Park: New York City is full of old terminals for streetcars from the olden days. Dan Barasch and James Ramsey of the Delancey Underground project are aiming to build an underground park beneath the hectic streets of Manhattan’s Lower East Side using one of the existing defunct trolley terminal for streetcars coming off the Williamsburg Bridge. This project integrates both green technology and the historical architectural features to turn unused underground space into something that can be a community hub, a marketplace, an art exhibition hall, and more. The founders are still raising funds to build a full scale model and to convince the city authorities that the public wants this project, so they've started a Kickstart campaign. Since they've started their $100,000 campaign, they've raised over $118,000 and there's still 33 days more to go! Way to go, Dan and James!

Beacon Hill Food Forest: I'm a huge fan of urban food gardens, so this project is close to my heart. Seattle's Beacon Hill neighborhood has always been sparse on formal public green space despite acres of free grassland around the long-defunct reservoir. During a permaculture course, a plan was drafted for a sustainable edible garden in the neighborhood, and eventually enough momentum was created to form a community group, contact the city council, and apply for grants to actually implement the plan. Now, the Friends of the Beacon Hill Food Forest are working with a landscape architect and volunteers to plan and execute the project. One of the challenges of a public community garden project like this will be balancing how the work and the harvest is divided. Successful community garden models I've come across, such as Incredible Edible Todmorden, have an open policy where everyone can join in on harvesting and eating, and work is shared by everyone. The trick is to create the community sense and get everyone to feel a sense of ownership over the project so they can share both responsibility and goods.

Local building - the 100 mile home

The locavore movement has encouraged people to eat food produced within a 100 miles from their home. Now, the momentum has shifted to sustainable architecture with the 100 mile home, building a house using materials found or recycled within 100 miles.

The concept of local building isn't new. Back in the day without airplanes and widespread transport, it was simply more practical and cheaper to use what resources were close by. But now it is commonplace to order marble from Italy and bamboo floors from China. Reframing the concept of building a house from local materials challenges architects to think about where each component of the house is made.

Like local eating, local building brings a lot of benefits, especially to the community. Naturalist and writer Briony Penn from British Columbia, with help from builder Michael Dragland, recently built a 100 mile house on Salt Spring Island. As she says,

"The 100-mile house is just fun. It provides a fun way to define how you're going to build a house, because you go out and you talk to all your neighbors, and it builds community and puts money back in the hands of everybody in your community."

Last week, the Architecture Foundation of British Columbia launched an international competition to design a 1,200-square-foot, four-person home that exclusively uses materials made or recycled within 100 miles of Vancouver. It'll be interesting to see what kind of designs come out of it!

Permablitz and Sharehood videos

Here's another cool time lapse of a permablitz I did back in Nov 2011. Thanks to Tim Metherall for filming the timelapse. In the background you'll see a fox-proof chicken coup and "strawyard" being constructed, with lawn cleared and veggie beds prepared in the foreground.



The special thing about this permablitz was that the Sharehood, an Australian community organization about sharing appliances and helping people get to know their neighbors, donated the seedlings. Everyone who came got to take a free veggie seedling home, the only catch was you had to take two, and give one to a neighbour and tell them about The Sharehood. The Sharehood "aims to build joyful, sustainable and resilient communities by encouraging people to get to know their neighbours and share with them." There's an online tool and services trading network. Learn more at the Sharehood or watch the little video below with Michael Green, who gave a workshop at the blitz. It's a great model for community building.

Michael Green from Sharehood from Raphaela Lee on Vimeo.

Atlanta Entrepreneurs Think Outside the Boxcar with Healthy Corner Store

Reposting a Daily Good article on rebranding the food movement. Read more!

Atlanta Entrepreneurs Think Outside the Boxcar with Healthy Corner Store

As entrepreneurs and food activists attempt to bring fresh produce to more and more urban food deserts, they're setting their crosshairs on one target in particular: the corner store. Packed to the gills with cigarettes, lotto tickets, liquor, and processed foods, the shops do little to nourish the communities where they operate, and in many urban areas—particularly black, Latino, or low-income neighborhoods—these stores are the only places to buy any food at all.

According to Alphonzo and Alison Cross, founders of The Boxcar Grocer in Atlanta (and winners of GOOD's contest to redesign the supermarket), this needs to change. Their just-opened corner store alternative, where local and organic food options get prime shelf space, is an attempt to respect "the fact that every community desires fresh food, and locally made food is just about as fresh as you can get," says Alison.

The Castleberry Hill neighborhood, where Boxcar sits, is full of preserved railroad warehouses (hence the name), but doesn't have another decent grocery store within five miles, despite its proximity to City Hall and college campuses. "We chose to put the store here exactly for this reason," says Alison. "The demographics, to us, looked like a sure sign of success."

The brother-sister duo's mission is to broaden the appeal of the food movement to embrace more black eaters. The first step is the vintage train-themed brand. "Railroads are great connectors," according to Alison. "They are also what took African Americans out of the South, saving our lives in many instances, as well as brought them back to visit their families." While the typical branding on the nonprofits and businesses of the local food movement tends to idealize an agricultural lifestyle, that's "something the African American community does not really desire to go back to, even though we need to address lots of health issues directly related to the type of foods we're eating," Alison says.

The store has enjoyed the support of "the entire Atlanta community" since its launch in November, with residents of other neighborhoods already asking the Crosses to open outposts. "The only real challenge," Alison says, "is how to keep enough food on the shelves on a daily basis."

Find out more about Boxcar Grocer here!