CHICKENS!

Hello, Long Weekend! Hello, Minimal Morning Sickness! Hello, Renewed Creative Engery! Hello, Chickens! That's right, there are chickens. Okay, so the cuties pictured here don't live on my urban homestead, which is a total bummer. But they do live on Stacy and Brian's suburban homestead, which we visited last weekend (sidenote - Go Bears! We kept the Axe!). And these are their babies. Above is, I think, Panama Red.
This is Red and either Chicken Hawk, Chica or Cocoa, enjoying some free time out in the yard.
How cute are they? And only six months old. Hopefully there will be eggs soon, but Stacy and Brian might have to wait until the warmer weather this spring. When they start laying, they'll produce an egg every other day or so. A dozen fresh eggs a week. How yummy does that sound?
Red, roosting.
And this is the gorgeous coop that Brian built in their backyard. A month or so back he tore out their entire (beautiful) backyard, because Brian gets bored with things after a while. We saw the rough versions of the beds he's building in the garden now and I can already tell they're going to be even more spectacular. Damn him and his handy/arty-ness. Why can't my brain function like this? And since it can't, how do you think I can bribe him to come down and do something like this for us in LA?

Patchwork Farms - A CSA-Style Enterprise in Marin

Stacy and Brian are starting a new endeavor up in Marin, a CSA-like project called Patchwork Farms that sounds absolutely fantastic.

The idea is simple - people in the greater Ross Valley area can sign up to barter and trade their abundance of fruits and veggies with other neighbors in the area. All the information is available on their website (linked above).

If you're up in Marin, sign up today!

How Does Your Garden Grow?

We're about six weeks into the spring/summer/fall garden and things are growing great. There were some lofty plans to take the space and build a huge raised bed, but time and bad backs got in the way. So we're going ahead with the usual container/wine barrel garden we've had for the past five or six years. And like every spring, we've added a few more containers.

What's growing? Tomatoes (13 and counting, we added a Northern Lights that we discovered at the HFM last weekend), Japanese eggplant, Persian cucumbers (the best for the hundreds of Greek salads we eat during the summer), serrano peppers, Charentrais melons, 4 kinds of beets, swiss chard, silverbeet spinach, spring onions, rainbow carrots, turnips, strawberries (with actually berries, for the first time ever!), 4 kinds of basil, rosemary, 2 kinds of thyme, lemon verbena, oregano, Bob Marley mint (it smells smokey when you rub it, another HFM find), tarragon, sage (the flowers are below) and lavender.
And that's just for now. We're bound to adopt a few more things over the course of the spring/summer. Including, hopefully, a fig tree. To go with the Meyer lemon tree I forgot to mention. As you can imagine, my other career option is farming.

The early mornings would be tough, though.

And Now I'm Obsessed with Urban Chickens

So through a very convoluted chain that started with voting in the Well Fed Network Food Blog awards (one of my favorite bloggers is nominated), I suddenly found myself falling into the world of Urban Chicken Farming. Falling in love that is.

Okay, I think I may have mentioned this before, but I've always wanted to be a farmer. Like, you know that test they make you take in high school that's supposed to tell you what you should be when you grow up? Mine gave me two options - writer or farmer. Currently fulfilling the former, dreaming of fulfilling the latter. Noah and I often talk about retiring to some kind of goat/sheep farm and making cheese once we get bored with the entertainment industry (or, you know, filthy rich). But today I was reading about a bunch of Angelenos who are already doing the farm thing, in their urban backyards. And it made me really, really jealous.

I want a chicken coop! I want farm fresh eggs in my own back yard. I want adorable little chicks (which I learned here, don't stay chicks for long). How long until Noah and I can afford our own house? Because you know our animal-phobic landlords will not even let us think about chicken coop-ing it up here (they always deny our yearly request for a dog, so chickens would probably make them lose their shit).

I'm not one to root for the current economic downturn to continue, but if it means we can buy a house, and a chicken coop, sooner rather than later. Well...