By: Rob Thoms co-owner of The Artful Gardeners
Keeping Chickens at My Disposal
Introducing an environmentally friendly, energy-efficient, localized waste-stream garbage disposal unit. What’s it called? Well, they, are Buffy, Ginger, Phoenix, Cuckoo, and Token.
They’re my chickens.
Indeed, it’s not news that backyard chickens have skyrocketed in popularity in the last five years. Seattle Tilth, an organic demonstration garden and urban ecology organization in Seattle, has organized a city chicken coop tour for over a decade, successfully increasing regional interest and participation in families raising flocks. And there are scores of new books, magazines, and websites dedicated to the practice for city-dwellers, suburbanites, and rural residents.
For keeping chickens, motivations run the gamut from “just for the eggs” to entertainment and companionship. Eggs from backyard chickens are as local as you can get, fresher, more flavorful, and healthier. My chickens are a delight to watch, whether taking a dust bath, announcing the passage of an egg, sitting on their roost at night, slurping up bugs, or following me as I pass their run.
Keepers of chickens frequently cite other positive benefits of the birds: they eat slugs, their manure makes great fertilizer, and they can be kept in an area to prepare it for gardening by scratching and pecking all the weeds and weed seeds while simultaneously tilling the dirt with their claws and fertilizing it with manure.
But my favorite reason? Chickens help to close the waste loop at home. What I mean is that we cancelled our yard waste container and instead throw almost all of our food scraps and yard waste into the chicken run, which has a multitude of benefits: 1) we save $7.72 (about the cost of two dozen local organic free-range eggs) by not subscribing to Olympia’s curbside organics pick-up service; 2) that material stays local instead of being trucked to Silver Springs Organics for composting and then packaged or trucked back to a consumer as finished compost; 3) the girls get to supplement their diet with fresh greens (like dandelion leaves) and grains (veggie or weed seeds); 4) what they don’t eat contributes to a thick organic layer in their run that attracts worms and bugs for them to eat; 5) our chicken feed expenses are reduced because they supplement their diet with greens, grains, and grubs; and 6) twice a year I clean all of it out of the run and assemble it into a compost pile, which generally has the right combination of carbon and nitrogen (thanks to the manure), to cook really hot and kill perennial weed roots (like dandelion), and cook any weed seed they didn’t eat, so we get our own compost at home for free with zero carbon footprint for hauling and delivery.
This is a great example of a sustainable permaculture system, where problems are turned into solutions with benefits at many steps of the process. I can’t take credit for making it; give that to the ever-brilliant mother nature.
Rob Thoms is an Olympia resident and co-owner of The Artful Gardeners, where they design and build nourishing gardens for the body and spirit (www.theartfulgardener.net). He can be reached at robbethoms@gmail.com for edible garden and urban farm coaching and consultations.
