Putting One's Money Where One's Mouth Is....

The Stearns family can be counted as among the very first friends of Myrtle, and they are among our favorite people.  In fact, Hugh and Linda will get custody of our kids if we are struck by a falling meteor while out tending the chickens.  The chickens, alas, are not mentioned in our will, so there's no telling who would get custody of them.  We suspect it would be the neighborhood hawks.  As to what makes them "friends of Myrtle", though, the record is clear:  when we announced to the world that we were not only going to get backyard chickens, we in fact had backyard chickens, the Stearns clan did not have that glazed "I'm talking to a crazy person look" on their faces that practically everyone else had.

To make their affinity even stronger, they went and got chickens themselves.  Bravo!  A bizarre variance hearing later, and their coop is in the one legal spot in their yard -- very much more exposed to the public than their neighbors would have preferred, but that's a long story, and we'll let them share it someday, if they are so inclined.  We hope we helped them feel empowered to get birds in the backyard themselves.

Anyway, the ultimate point of this story is, Myrtle is jealous.  The Stearns' coop is so very much better than ours, in several points: 

First, the laying boxes are in an interior shed; the feeding/scratching area outside the interior coop meets city code, but it's not where the birds actually lay nor where they sleep.  Our coop, in contrast, is essentially one room -- a 12 foot tall, 10 foot by 10 foot room, true, but it's not like they have an interior area to which they may escape.

That has been particularly relevant the last couple of nights, when the temperatures have dropped down below 20 degrees fahrenheit.  We've had to wrap ridiculous blankets clipped to the sides of Myrtle's coop with clothespins, piled up with scrap lumber to hold them in place during the wind, and then we've strung a couple of space heaters inside to (hopefully) keep the girls at least above freezing.

Hugh and Linda, by contrast, simply hung a heat lamp in the coop, and they're golden.

The second, and no less significant, difference is that the Stearns' coop is just so much better looking.  We have weathered posts covered by chicken wire, with a clear polyurethane roof, which (due to weather) we have covered with a canvas tarp.  They, by contrast, have a bright green wooden building with a nice red door, and a white frame with chicken wire surrounding the chicken yard.

Clearly, this situation cannot be allowed to stand.  Renovations on Myrtle's coop will begin this spring.

Meanwhile, setting aside our petty jealousies for a moment, we would like to pay homage to this family.  They put their money where their mouths are.  Of course, building the coop was a little easier for them than it would be for others, as they own Stearns Design Build, the premier environmentally conscious construction / renovation / consulting firm in Bryan - College Station.  Even with that being said, however, they put more work into their backyard garden than anybody else we know, and that is saying something, because in our journey to eventual sustainability, we have met some incredible gardeners.

Austin has the Funky Chicken Coop Tour, and we salute them for it.  We would also like to do them one better, linking not just the funkiness of ones' chicken coop (the Stearns' coop has a dragon head as an emblem... which is pretty darned funky, if you ask us), but also by pointing to the holistic character of chickens in context of the backyard as a food production headquarters.

We have posted before about the importance of compost.  Hugh and Linda were on the compost bandwagon before they got chickens.  And their garden is monumentally, megalithically majestic in many, many ways.  Their blackberry cobbler causes excess drooling from three counties away.  Their eggplants could hatch purple chickens.  They grow enough peppers and tomatoes to produce sauces for pastas, chips, and roasts of every description and international variety.  And they grow mint like it's a weed.

At a party this weekend, we were each of us discussing as a family the benefits of backyard birding to a non-chicken-raising family, and we almost simultaneously imparted that, yes, we raise them for the eggs, but it's mostly for the compost.

And that's when it occurred to us:  don't just say it, do it.  Someone else gets it.  May many more join the bandwagon.  Just... wear your old jeans.  There's lots of garden dirt on here...

Happy farming!