Robert and Hannah Litt of Portland wrote A Chicken in Every Yard, published in 2011. They regard their chickens as pets to pamper and keep safe – they only eat their eggs. This book will tell you how to do the same.
On a visit to the island of Kauai in Hawai’i, the Litt family discovered that chickens have naturalized and do quite well looking after themselves. This led to a new book, The New Rules of the Roost (2018) that incorporates some of this avian independence. Now the setting for their home flock is “more dynamic, so that our chickens can safely forage for food and scratch around, but when and where we want them to.”
How does all this work with the garden? Very well, if you consider the hens as part of the family – it just takes a lot of compromise and ingenuity.
Published in Garden Notes: Northwest Horticultural Society, Fall 2018