So you know what I’d like to do? Not today, not this year, but maybe once the boys get a little older and I have a bit of free time on my hands again?<\/p>\n
Raise a couple of chickens in the back yard.<\/p>\n
(waits patiently for gales of laughter to subside)<\/p>\n
No, really! Back at the end of December, I read an article in the Citizen <\/em><\/a>about the urban chicken movement, and I was intrigued. According to what I’ve read, the chickens are reasonably low maintenance, actually good for your back yard, and two hens will produce eight to ten fresh eggs a week. How cool is that? Educationally amazing for the boys, healthy for us, good for the environment, minimal effort on my part — I love the idea.<\/p>\n I know my mother is rolling around on the floor laughing as she’s reading about this, and Beloved – who to his credit has gone along with just about all of my schemes and capers with nary a whimper of complaint – has flat out refused to even talk about this. He hates chickens, except when they’re on the barbecue with a good coating of tandoori marinade. I admit, I’m a little creeped out by them myself. But if they were our chickens, that would be different, right?<\/p>\n This blog about urban chickens <\/a>gives an idea of the amount of work involved:<\/p>\n That sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? (An Eglu <\/a>is a chicken coop specifically designed for urban chickens. A lot more aesthetically pleasing than your standard chicken-wire and wood coop, no?)<\/p>\n My only concern would be the Ottawa winters. Not chicken-friendly. Not only is it bloody cold for a bloody long time, the last time I checked there was about a foot of snow in the back yard (not to mention, erm, about three months worth of dog poop.) And even if by some stretch of the imagination I was able to convince Beloved to let me keep a couple of chickens in the back yard, there is no way on gods’ green earth that he’d let me overwinter them in the house or even the garage.<\/p>\n (Not to mention the tiny but insistent voice in my head that keeps yammering on about the poor, hapless house plants I bring home from the grocery store in a fit of enthusiasm every five or six months, only to neglect into withered brown stumps within a couple of weeks.)<\/p>\n What do you think? Excellent idea or pure folly? Would you do it? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So you know what I’d like to do? Not today, not this year, but maybe once the boys get a little older and I have a bit of free time on my hands again? Raise a couple of chickens in the back yard. (waits patiently for gales of laughter to subside) No, really! Back at … Continue reading “Another harebrained scheme, you say? Chicken-brained, maybe.”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1772","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-in-ottawa","category-life-the-universe-and-everything"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1772","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1772"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1772\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1776,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1772\/revisions\/1776"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1772"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1772"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1772"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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