Tomorrow is the first chicken coop tour in Phoenix! Check it out if you get a chance- there will be twelve coops around the valley open to visitors on the tour- B. and I are excited to attend- we went to the annual tour in Seattle, sponsored by Seattle Tilth- at the time, it just seemed like it was going to be another community garden related thing, but afterwards, we were hooked! We knew that as soon as we had a little patch of land to call our own, we’d get our own little flock of feathered friends…

As far as this local tour, it’s organized through the Phoenix Permaculture Guild, and we were on the planning committee for the “Tour de Coops” as it’s been named. I did the graphics for the poster, t-shirt, and booklet. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough time to print the poster for distribution,(although there are a few copies floating around) but here’s what it looked like:

for Gourmet magazine- my favorite food publication… Conde Nast announced on Monday that it was closing the magazine- see this article. So sad! But there’s a movement to save the magazine, via crowdsourcing… please join!

Once again, I’m a bit behind on posting, but here are some photos of some of our summer garden highlights. I want to say that we’re officially in fall, since temperatures have fallen to around the one hundred degree mark, although yesterday it was back up to 103F. (For all of you non-Phoenicians, yes, 100 degrees is cooler weather)!

cucumbers – armenian + pickling

watermelon- this was our biggest one- over 14 pounds!

grapes- this is a bunch of thompson seedless green grapes

melons – minnesota midgets – we’re still growing/harvesting charentais melons…

These days, since it’s so hot out, we let the chickens run around the east side yard for about an hour, while we’re watering some of our new plantings along the perimeter fence. Ok, its not exactly a green pasture, per se, but it is pretty green, and with the grass, and the shade of the pecan trees, it’s pretty darn pleasant!

Here’s the side yard (I told you it was green!):

And here are the chickens enjoying themselves:

Sweetie, being a naughty chicken, standing on the picnic table:

Spotty-dotty, as she contemplates nibbling on the fig vine:

Polka-dotty2, hunting for tasty tidbits in the grass:

Tweetie, looking a little scraggly (- she’s currently molting):

Brownie, looking a little stunned ( I actually had taken a terrific photo of her just previously, looking up at me, but I forgot to turn of f the flash, so she wasn’t willing to look straight into the camera after that)…:

Sorry for the delay in posting! Anyway…

Other varieties of tomatoes we currently have in the garden, are:

Black Krim – My personal favorite, as far as taste, and appearance. This russian heirloom variety is considered a “black” tomato- which just refers to its coloring. It’s a relatively soft tomato, and a very “tomato” taste- not too sweet- if anything, a little salty. We’ve planted it before, and its probably the one of the few varieties that we’ll plant every year- it seems to do very well here, both prolific and able to tolerate most of the heat, with a little helpful shade in late summer… One of the best things is that the color seems to fool the wild birds- its not as red as some of the other tomato varieties we’ve got in the garden.

Early Girl -  This is one of the only two non-heirloom tomatoes we planted in the garden this year. Thomas Keller mentioned this tomato in his Bouchon cookbook, so we planted it- but frankly, I wasn’t that impressed. The most impressive thing about it was that it really was an early tomato- it was our first variety to start ripening, and it was pretty prolific. The tomatoes were bright red, and you really had to wait until they were completely red- not a tinge of orange, otherwise they would be a little tart. I’m not sure if we’ll plant this again next year- it was a decent tomato, and certainly better than anything you get in the store, but not the best one we grew!

Yellow jelly bean tomato – This was our other non-heirloom variety- and it was terrific! We decided to plant this yellow grape tomato instead of the sungold, which is the yellow cherry tomato we’ve done before. Once again, its another one that you have to wait until its actually almost orange (instead of yellow) before you pick it- in order for it to taste sweet! The chickens really like the yellow tomatoes- both this variety and the yellow pear- for some reason, they found the red ones a little disturbing…

Red Zebra -  This is the red version of the green zebra. This one started out really well, but once we reached 110F, the fruit started to get blossom end rot. Still, it’s a terrific tomato, tasty, a little tart, prolific, and very attractive! (Although almost everyone who saw it first asked if there was something wrong with the tomato…) B’s mom had a good name for them- she kept calling them “tiger tomatoes!”

Thanks to my new “lighting studio” I built for my business (see this post about how to make your own), I decided to photograph some of our tomatoes- we’ve got a bumper crop this year, and all of us (the chickens too) are quite pleased that almost all of the varieties we planted are bearing fruit! I’ll post a few photos and notes about the varieties over the next few days…

Stupice tomatoes – This is orginally a Czech heirloom variety. We’ve been growing this type for years- both here, and back when we lived in Seattle. Its an early bearing variety, with fruit about 2″ in diameter. Although we’ve noticed that the fruits are getting smaller and smaller, the hotter it gets outside- the ones pictured above are about 1.5″ in diameter- cherry tomato size- although when the plant first started fruiting, we did have the typical 2″ fruits. These are tasty- sweet, but a little tart, with a full tomato flavor.

Yellow Pear tomatoes- This is another heirloom variety- with fruit about 1.5″ long. The plant is very prolific- and is quickly taking over the space alloted to some of the other tomatoes we’ve planted! The fruit is sweet, with a good “tomato” taste. These are best picked when the color is starting to deepen from yellow to a golden orange.

More tomatoes to come…

For the past few days, the chickies have been snacking on some fresh, organic, local baby lettuces from a friend (thanks J!)

The greens were a little wilted for our friend, but once we refreshed the leaves with a little rinse and spin, our girls thought they were a tasty treat! And why wouldn’t they, when the farm that grew the lettuce supplies some of the best restaurants in town?

We always like to joke that our chickens eat better than most folks- since almost everything they eat is organic, and sometimes local to boot.

Here’s what they eat:

organic layer pellets – This is their primary source of food. (Layer pellets are formulated for chickens who lay eggs- there is a higher percentage of calcium in the food, to help them produce eggs with nice, strong shells. You can’t feed the same food to baby chickens, or chickens that are not yet laying- since their bodies don’t rid themselves of calcium by making eggshells, the calcium buildup in their bodies can cause liver damage. You can actually mix up your own chicken feed from a variety of grains and other food sources, but with the way our chickens like to “pick and choose” what they eat, they’d probably just eat what tastes the best, and not everything they need!)

grass + bugs – Whatever they forage when we let them free range around the yard in the afternoons and on the weekends. Grass and other wild green plants (uh, weeds…) give them lots of Omega3 fatty acids,  and bugs give them protein and calcium.

organic yogurt – A few times a week they get a couple of spoonfuls. We give it to them both for additional calcium and for probiotics (just as important for chickens as humans)- but they also love the taste! They lap it up and Sweetie often ends up with it all over her comb and wattle…We just give them the same stuff we eat- its easier than buying a separate container for them, since we don’t eat that much of it.

scratch – a mixture of seeds and grains such as millet, corn, quinoa, etc… (It’s their morning treat- we scatter a handful around in their run, when we let them out in the morning- picture Laura Ingalls feeding the chickens – I like to pretend that I’m wearing a long calico dress + bonnet). Its especially good for them in the wintertime, because all of the cracked corn in the mix provides additional fat to help them keep warm.

organic rolled oats - We mix a couple handfuls in with their scratch in the summertime- its supposed to promote healthy egg laying, and also cut back on the amount of fat that scratch provides.

grapes – Their favorite treat- generally only provided on the weekends- whenever B. and I have snack time, the girls have snack time too! You should see how high they’ll jump for grapes!

garden produce – You can’t get any more local and organic than the stuff right out of our garden! Sometimes its lettuce – they love frisee and escarole…These days, its tomatoes from the garden- we have a bunch of cherry tomatoes, and I can’t resist Spotty-Dotty’s begging- she stands outside the garden when I’m harvesting, and makes a high-pitched kind of whine- so I end up tossing her a tomato, and then next thing you know, everyone wants one!

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Of course, if you ask the chickens, they don’t get nearly enough treats, so they like to supplement on their own by sneaking into the garden! We still blame Tweetie for the fact that we didn’t eat any yellow tomatoes last summer..

Tweetie is our other red chicken- the alpha to Sweetie’s beta. She’s the biggest chicken out of the bunch, but despite her physical size, she’s at the bottom of the pecking order…and usually the hungriest… looking for Tweetie? Usually you’ll find her in the middle of the tomatoes- eating away… When Tweetie was a mere ball of fluff, she was always the one that would stay awake the longest- and would begin “tweeting” loudly, upon finding herself the only one awake. She’s always active, and definitely a go-getter – especially after tasty morsels! She loves to follow us around when she thinks we might have something delicious hidden up our sleeves- constantly asking us for a little bite- “bok-bok-bok! bok-bok- BOK! “  She’s also the strongest flier we have- and able to make quite a few leaps/jumps – between her powerful wings and strong legs and haunches, she’s managed to land on my back when I’m bent over, or on my shoulder when I’m standing straight. (Granted, I’m only 5′-2″, so its not as though she’s landing on the moon…) But you should the height she’ll go for a grape!

She’s also very fond of “helping” us refill her feeder- she’ll jump up on the bench next to me, and will “help” pour the chicken feed pellets- basically using her beak to kick them out of the measuring cup, in order to get to the bottom, where are the tasty little crumbles are hidden. It reminds me of when I used to eat sugary cereal – I’d always try to dig down to the bottom of the box- and either pour those tasty sugary bits into my milk to turn it pink, or, when no one was looking, tip them straight into my mouth…

Tweetie is also one of our best layers- consistently producing big, light-to-medium brown eggs, that are also sometimes speckled. She’s very fond of looking at what she’s laid- she’ll stand up in the nest box, and use her beak to tuck her egg underneath her, moving it this way and that. Once, she was trying to move it so far beneath her that she actually lost her balance, and ended up on her back! I panicked and quickly turned her right-side-up, but she was unfazed- still busy looking at her accomplishment!

ready to eat right now:

arugula

beets, bull’s blood

beets, chiggoia

beets, dutch baby balls

beets, early wonder

beets, yellow

broccoli – last bits

carrots, scarlet nantes

celery

escarole

fava beans

kale, tuscan

leeks

lettuce, frisee

lettuce, red oak

mizuna

onions, red

peas, english wonder

scallions

snow peas

snap peas

spinach

strawberries

swiss chard, rainbow

turnips

herbs: basil (italian sweet), bay (laurel), burnet, chives, garlic chives, cilantro, dill, english thyme, espazote, garlic chives, lemon thyme, marjoram, mint (spearamint), oregano (greek), parsley (italian flat-leaf), rosemary (barbeque), sage (purple), tarragon (french), lemongrass

growing, but not ready to be eaten yet:

asparagus

beans, lima

carrots, kuroda

cucumbers, armenian

cucumbers, english

cucumbers, pickling

eggplant, japanese (ichiban)

figs, genoa

figs, kudota

figs, mission

grapes, red flame

grapes, thompson seedless

horseradish

melon, charentais

melon, canteloupe

melon, eden green

melon, minnesota midget

onions, red

onions, cioppolini

peppers,chocolate bell

peppers, red bell

peppers, jalapeno

squash, butternut (winter)

squash, zucchini (summer)

tomatoes, black krim

tomatoes, red grape

tomatoes, red zebra

tomatoes, stupice (heirloom)

tomatoes, early girl

tomatoes, yellow pear (heirloom)

tomatoes, black krim

tomatoes, crimson carmello

tomatoes, costuolo

again… sorry for the long hiatus! but we’re back now- and a lot has happened since the last time we posted- the chickies had their first birthday (lots of grapes and yogurt all around) – so now, they are officially, “hens”.  Apparently any chicks before the age of one are considered “pullets”.  Here’s a little video of some of the girls in action- just in case you’ve forgotten what they look like…

Did you notice that Brownie was only in the video for a little while before she wandered off? 

It might be because she was busy producing one of these:

Brownie finally started laying 2 weeks before her first birthday- about 6 months later than everyone else!  Who knows why she was such a late bloomer- but she’s pretty happy with herself- beautiful light green/olive eggs (not that you can tell from the photos…)!

But you should have seen her face after she laid the first one- since all the other chickens started laying when they were younger + smaller, their first eggs were also younger + smaller- but Brownie laid a full-size one – she looked shell-shocked (ha!)…To give you some sort of perspective, if you were a chicken, it would be the equivalent of laying a NINE POUND EGG!