We're now a one-coop family

Russ built our first chicken coop during spring break of 2008, when our first batch of chicks were still tiny and Rosie was less than a year old. He didn't have clear plans for it and made trips to Home Depot every few hours to buy more tools, nails and wood. It took a full week to build and has had a number of renovations and re-paintings since then. It is dog and wild cat-proof, weather-proof and has two levels and a variety of exits, entrances, ramps, doors and egg boxes. It is the biggest backyard chicken coop I've seen. Its many re-modellings reflected our developing understanding of raising chickens and their needs. Ultimately, we realized that it wasn't right for our climate. Russ built a second smaller coop last year that was more suited to the windy conditions of our environment and this year he constructed a chicken run (small fence) around it. We had been wondering what to do with the old one. Yesterday, we sold it.

The First Harvest of the Season: Accidental Radishes

I was watering the garden this morning and discovered radishes in the lettuce box. I thought they were a variety of lettuce until this morning when I noticed large red bulges at the base of the plants. I was particularly surprised as I hadn't planted radishes in this spot. I was out with my toddler girls planting seeds in April and May. Rosie was very good at sprinkling handfuls of seed in the little furrows I had made, but Alex was more interested in grabbing fistfuls of seed, tasting them, spitting them out and throwing them into random garden beds. As it happened, the radish seeds I planted were dug up and eaten by the chickens, who were subsequently moved into a fenced-in chicken run. Alex's radishes were the only ones to survive. Perhaps I should let her do more of the planting.

Our Story

While living in a tiny flat in Cambridge, England, Russ and I started watching River Cottage.  Its hard not to be taken in by a tv show with scenes of the lush English countryside, the raising of sheep and vegetables and the drama of the county fair. More than that, the program introduced us to food politics, particularly to the harsh realities of the meat and poultry industry and we began to read more about these issues. At that time, Russ started to talk about someday getting some chickens. I thought he was seriously crazy. We were Ph.D students heading for academia and high tech industry, not bumpkins heading for the farm. He read about the Eglu, a combination chicken coop and run, and told me how easy it would be to keep chickens in our own backyard someday. I couldn't believe what I was hearing.

I don't remember when I changed my mind. Perhaps it was after my disastrous first try at growing tomatoes in the window sill of our flat. The plant grew to be six feet tall, with about five leaves and eventually one tomato. I realized that if I was going to grow anything real, I needed more than a window box. At that time, our friends were starting to get pregnant and we began to talk about the future of our own family. We had both been fortunate to grow up with open outdoor spaces and we wanted that for our children. We wanted them to know where food comes from and of course Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall had convinced us of the pleasures of living and growing in the countryside. We planned on moving back to America, but we figured that someday we would be able to make it work. We wanted to make it work.


In a whirlwind weekend in January 2007, we finished our theses, said goodbye to student life and England, and moved 6,000 miles to southern Utah. I was six months pregnant with our first child and the transition was a difficult one. Apart from leaving behind beloved friends and family, we left behind lots of good food. The local supermarket had a tiny selection of ridiculously-priced produce and the most promising, yet deceptive, meat label read "All Natural!" This was very different from what we had encountered in England, where fears about genetically-modified food had sent the major supermarkets into an organic frenzy several years before. As poor students, we purchased organic milk for a tolerable premium of about 30 cents. Here in America, our cheapest organic milk option was at Costco, where we could buy it for about three times the price of conventionally-produced milk. We did that for a while, but had to give up when our kids started drinking cows milk and suddenly we were going through multiple gallons per a week. The purchase of organic fruits and vegetables and organic or free-range meat was often within our household budget when we lived in England. In this country, I can sometimes find organic food in the local supermarket, but it is rarely within our budget.


The food culture that we encountered and continue to encounter here in America has only made us more determined to be involved in the production of our own food. We rented a small house during our first year in southern Utah and then bought a house on an acre lot in a small community outside of town. We've been in this house for two and a half years and have started to build a different kind of life. Russ and I teach at the local college for nine months of the year and during the summer we become farmers. We're planting trees, raising chickens, growing a garden and just recently started keeping bees. This blog will chronicle our domestic agricultural adventures and give us space to discuss the variety of issues we encounter.