EVERY MORNING, MUSIC and Baby are up with the sun.
By 7 a.m., they are out the door, stopping for a quick bite before going off to work.
Rain or shine, they are on the job in the garden, weeding, killing pests, fertilizing and composting.
They don’t knock off until dusk, they work weekends and holidays, and they only take short breaks.
And during their breaks, each produces a masterpiece of culinary art.
Music and Baby are lay members of the chicken coop co-op at the Dundee Hill Community Garden, off Hastings on the west end of town.
Hatched more than a year ago, the co-op was formed by a group of neighbors who offer the chickens room and board in exchange for fresh-laid eggs.
Last Sunday, organizer Judith Alexander explained the benefits of chicken coop co-oping to a more than a dozen locals interested in starting their own backyard chicken coop, either by themselves or with a group of neighbors.
Flocking together
The chief benefit of flocking together:
“You have one day of work instead of seven days of work,” Alexander said.
Alexander used to have a small flock of her own until a “raccoon situation” developed, she said.
Wanting to secure a source of fresh eggs, she organized the chicken co-op as a separate entity from the Dundee Hill Community Garden.
Eight households signed up, each anteing $50 to buy materials to build the coop, order 20 chicks and buy the first sack of feed.
“We built the coop cooperatively,” Alexander said.
Members also donated chicken wire and other material, and neighbors with Hope Roofing contributed a piece of metal for the coop roof.
The chicks, which cost $1 a piece, arrived in March and spent the first few weeks in the garage of foster parents Jonathan and Laura Moore.
The Moores’ own older chicks, Anabel and Arden, helped raise the babies, naming each one.
Children’s delight
One of the joys of being in a neighborhood coop, Alexander said, is seeing the delight the children take in the chicks. Anabel and Arden still help out now that their charges are grown, as will their new baby sister, Ayla, when she is old enough.
“You want children in your co-op because they are closer to the ground,” Alexander said. “They don’t have to lean over so far to put out food and water or clean up.”
Another neighbor, 82-year-old Kurt Klingman, also did a stint as foster father to the chicks until they were big enough to be in the coop.
n Coop fact No. 1: Chicks take five months to mature, so the flock didn’t start laying until August.
n Coop fact No. 2: Production is light-dependent: Chickens don’t lay as often in the winter as in summer, when they lay every day.
Each member of the household works one day, Alexander said, opening the coop in the morning to release the chickens into the runs, putting out feed and water, and putting down fresh straw.
“You gather your eggs on the day you work,” Alexander explained.
Members also move the portable run every two weeks to a different part of the garden that needs clearing or let the chickens out into a section of the garden before it’s planted.
Chickens not only eat weeds and slugs, but fertilize as they go, an agricultural method known as chicken tractoring from the name for a portable coop on wheels.
Elizabeth Merrill, who attended the tour, said she knew people whose chickens got out and ate everything in their garden.
The good news: They didn’t have slugs for the next three years.
‘Eating quack grass’
“They destroy everything,” Alexander said. “Anything green, they’ll eat. We’re letting them do the work of eating the quack grass.”
The straw put down to keep the coop and the outdoor runs from getting muddy makes excellent compost. And the members, as well as the neighbors, recycle vegetable peelings and other produce scraps.
“We don’t know how many people are actually feeding them,” Alexander said, noting that the Dundee Hill chickens seem to be larger than normal.
For some of the people taking the coop tour, the information was a refresher. Lys Burden, who plans to start a chicken co-op in the “School Hill” neighborhood west of the high school, said she used to have Banty hens.
Having chickens is a wonderful experience, she said, not only for the eggs, but also for the company.
“They have little personalities,” she said. “Whenever I came home, they would greet me. They get excited, as if saying, ‘She’s home, she’s home.’”
Dennis Crawford said he was interested in forming a community garden and chicken co-op with friends on property east of the Chinese Gardens.
Crawford, an anthropologist, was a Peace Corps trainer at Oregon State University in 1966, where part of the India-area studies program included how to raise laying hens.
n Coop fact No. 3: The sex of the chicken can be determined in the egg by candling, which eliminated the problem of what to do with the roosters in India, Crawford said.
Seeing the Dundee flock also brought back memories of when he was 10 years old and wary of the family rooster.
“We had chickens in Silverdale during World War II,” he said. “Everybody raised something back then.”
Chicken co-op member Jan Tobin also was on hand to answer questions, as was Cecelia Carnigan, who came over with son Ray from their house that borders the garden.
37 years of experience
Tobin, the wellness department manager at the Food Co-op, said her experience with communal gardens goes back to 1974, when she started the first community garden in Eugene, Ore., with Dan Goldstein and Bill Lutz.
Also on the tour were Sue and Richard Dandridge, who are thinking of having two laying hens. Cameron McPherson and Linda Smith were looking for tips on starting a co-op coop at the Oak Street Community Garden.
n Coop fact No. 4: Figure out how many eggs you need, then work back to how many chickens will produce that number.
The number of chickens will determine the size of the coop, Alexander said.
n Coop fact No. 5: If you have a broody hen, i.e. one that wants to sit in the nest and hatch eggs, take a fertilized egg and let her do it.
The hen will protect the hatchling, a good way to integrate more chickens into the flock.
Alexander told Tristan Brunner, 11, how to hold a chicken: with the wings firmly against the body, legs dangling, so that it can’t flap its wings or scratch with its claws.
Another tip: Don’t put a chicken down on the ground unless you enjoy a chase.
“We have ways of herding them,” Alexander said, demonstrating the technique of blocking off avenues of escape and funneling the chickens into the coop.
The chickens will naturally go back into the coop at dusk, Alexander said.
Raccoons, eagles and other predators haven’t been a problem so far, she said, though a dog got in and killed three of the original flock.
No predator problems
Shadow, who attended the tour with the Dandridges, was raised on a farm, they said, which is why he appeared uninterested in the subject of the presentation.
n Coop fact No. 6: Chickens are active layers for three years, then production tapers off.
It costs about $700 a year to buy organic feed for the flock, Alexander said, making the cost of eggs about $2 a dozen, a good price for large organic eggs — and for relatively little labor on the part of the human co-op members.
“If we learn to cooperate with each other,” Alexander said, “a lot of things could get easier for us on the planet.”
Alexander said that when she had a chicken coop at her house, she knew all her chickens by name.
The downside is that she doesn’t have that relationship, but the Dundee chickens do recognize Alexander’s car, and she always honks the horn when she drives by.
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Jennifer Jackson writes about Port Townsend and Jefferson County every Wednesday. To contact her with items for this column, phone 360-379-5688 or email jjackson@olypen.com.
