Even in Kyoto

Yesterday was the second annual Tour de Coops, an event organized and put on by the Phoenix Permaculture Guild, and we were one of the coops on the tour. Altogether, it made for an exhausting day - I'd estimate that at least 100 people came by to check out the coop and ask questions about it. One woman said that another coop on the tour (there were around 20 coops total) had people sign in when they arrived, and by the time she got there, over 250 people had signed in! I don't think my numbers were quite that high, but still, that's a lot of people. Many thanks to scrottie and DM for being present and helping out on the big day, and to trifold_flame for helping me with supply pick-up. And also to the three other volunteers who came by to help out. I think I spent a solid 7 hours talking to people about the coop, and learned a whole lot from all of the visitors. Whew. I decided that my overall role in the Tour was to show people that they don't have to make something fancy to house their chickens. A couple of the visitors told me about that one coop, which had electricity and plumbing and was designed by an architect (boy, I wish I could have seen it!). That sort of thing is clearly not possible for someone like me, so it's also good for people to know they don't have to have special skills to keep chickens happy. Another cool part of the Tour was that most of the people who participated were already chicken owners! So they had a lot of awesome stories to share with me, in addition to getting to hear some of the cool stories about our coop. Anyway, here are a few photos from the big day, ( behind the cut... )

Okay, I'm finally getting around to posting a few pictures. First, some overdue ones of painting the chick'n coop. Whee!

( coopery )

I need to keep this brief, because I still haven't managed to get in some nap-time, and I also need to grade a whole bunch of papers.

But I thought you would all enjoy an update about yesterday's adventures.

scrottie learned on Thursday or Friday that the Phoenix Permaculture Guild's ever-popular Keeping Chickens in Your Backyard class was going to be taught on Saturday morning. So we got up bright and early and rode our bikes over to the class, which was excellent: informative, entertaining, and confidence-boosting. We learned during the course of the class that this would be a good time of year to acquire chicks - usually, they aren't available after October, and getting them now means that they should start to lay shortly after the beginning of the new year.

After the class, we rode down to the Downtown Phoenix Farmer's Market, and somehow or another in the course of walking around the market we hatched (har har) a plan to pay a visit to one of the feed stores I'd heard about. At the market, we happened to run into an acquaintance with one of those insta-internet gadgets, which allowed us to pinpoint the location of the aforementioned feed store. The only hitch was the location: the feed store was on the opposite side of town from where I live. I wasn't completely certain we'd be able to bring chicks back to my house by bicycle, so I called around and secured a backup vehicle, and then we set out.

Altogether, we had to carry the chicks in my bike basket for about 22 miles, taking a couple of breaks along the way to make sure they were okay. They seem pretty happy and settled-in by now. As they continue to grow, we'll have to wrap up our construction work on the coop, and hopefully it will be finished by the time the birds are ready to move outside. In the meantime, the bike room is making a whole lot of peeping noises...

( some photographic evidence of our adventures... )

What a wonderful, busy weekend of gardening projects. On Saturday morning, scrottie and I picked up the lab truck from campus, drove to his house and picked up a borrowed rototiller, and then drove out to another graduate student's house to pick up a bunch of salvaged lumber for the chicken coop. [We also ran a few lab errands, to legitimize usage of the truck.] This other graduate student, M, lives in a house that's sort of on the edge of Phoenix and Laveen, in an area that's still at least somewhat agricultural (there's an open growing field across the street, for instance). His house was originally built as a sanitarium, with many bedrooms, and at a later point it was split into three separate dwelling units. Some time after that, it was abandoned and vandalized. M and his wife put in a ton of work to restore the house to some state of glory, and in all of the additional work on the property, M also tore down three outbuildings and salvaged as much of the lumber as he could. The buildings were from the era when things were built out of real materials.

I don't remember if I wrote about the Scrabble Society's first trip out to check out the lumber. We had a plan: build a chicken coop from scrap wood. But that was about as far as our plan went. So after we looked at the available material, we drew up a simple plan and a list of necessary supplies. The whole thing will be more or less a cube, with one and a half complete walls, a roof, and an adorable door. But then the plan sat dormant for a while--I was finishing up my summer research, and M had to do a lot of traveling so he wasn't available to help us go through the lumber. And I still haven't worked out some of the logistics involved in chicken-rearing (good book recommendations are encouraged!).

So to me it felt like a major accomplishment to finally pick up all of the wood. To S, though, it didn't seem like much had been gotten done--he won't be satisfied until nails go into boards. As I told him, though, that part has to wait until I can assemble more of the members of the Scrabble Society. The Scrabble Society members have specifically requested to be involved because the majority of us have never built anything like this before, and the only way to learn to construct such things is through hands-on experience. [If only my all-girls high school had offered shop class!] Besides, for most construction projects (as with sewing projects), the actual construction is really a minor part of the whole process.

In the meantime, we worked on other gardening projects instead. ( gardening project chatter ensues )