City Chicks: Keeping Micro-flocks of Chickens as Garden Helpers, Compost Makers, Bio-reyclers, and Local Food Producers
Product Description
Chickens have become the mascot of local food supply movements. All across America municipalities are allowing and even encouraging residents to keep laying hens within city limits. Increasingly, keeping hens is becoming a part of the green movement. Green city managers wanting to save money on solid waste management budgets need only to encourage residents to keep laying hens. Why? Because one chicken eats about 7 pounds of food “waste” a month. A few hundred households keeping micro-flocks of laying hens can not only turn kitchen waste into eggs, but the chicken manure can be combined with coop bedding and yard waste and transformed into compost and top soil for growing gardens. Chickens give communities the potential to divert tons of yard and food biomass “waste” from trash collection and, by doing so, save big-time tax payer dollars! City Chicks shows how you can: have fresh, heart-healthy eggs, daily from your backyard home flock. Employ your chicken… More >>
City Chicks: Keeping Micro-flocks of Laying Hens as Garden Helpers, Compost Makers, Bio-Recyclers and Local Food Suppliers is an easy-to-follow resource for anyone interested in raising hens, no matter how small the scale. Urban and suburban dwellers can benefit from raising “micro-flocks” of just a few chickens. Hens recycle organic materials from leftover food to grass clippings by eating it; they produce nutritious eggs; they are extraordinarily helpful gardeners that help to naturally control pest infestations (by eating those pesky bugs) and provide compost. They can make great centerpieces of conversation and even pets! City Chicks offers step by step instructions for raising and properly caring for hens, with notable warnings against common mistakes that new chicken keepers make. (It should be noted that roosters are often if not always illegal to own within city limits, and should not be kept since they have more aggressive tendencies than hens and their ceaseless crowing will disturb the peace). Written in plain, no-nonsense language, City Chicks is a “must-have” for any urban or suburban dweller interested in caring for a small-scale or micro-flock. Highly recommended.
I bought this book a couple of weeks ago, right before my first shipment of day-old chicks arrived. Boy, am I glad I did. The brooding chapter alone told me everything I needed to start my chicks. There is a very good check list of supplies. I took it with me to the Tractor Supply and bought everything I needed. The photos are very helpful; you can see how things are supposed to look. The day-by-day diary was also very helpful. As a first time brooder, I was very nervous, but breaking things down in day-by-day chunks made the process manageable. My friends started chicks last spring. They just followed the generic advice the hatchery sent and ended up with a lot of dead chicks. I haven’t had ANY losses. There was one chick dead-on-arrival in the box. The other twenty-four were thriving by the end of the first day.
The other thing I like about Pat’s brooder set-up is the hygiene. The aspen shavings keep everything very clean and dry. There is no smell at all.
I heartily recommend this book.
This is a great book. It has all of the info that a person needs to start raising chickens. I am really excited to use the things that I have learned… especially about integrating the chickens with pest management and composting.
Anyone interested in a small backyard flock of chickens, pickup this book! It is truly a wealth of information that will get you off on the right foot. Pat shares her experiences in poultry raising and how to best take care of your new arrivals. I’m very pleased at how the book is written and it’s at a level we can all understand.
Buy it.
Patricia embeds a broader, profound message about society’s relationship with nature in a well-written, entertaining work. Her knowledge is grounded in both in-depth research and enthusiastic practice, and this passion shines through in City Chicks.