Patricia L. Foreman

City Chicks: Keeping Micro-flocks of Chickens As Garden Helpers, Compost Makers, Bio-reyclers, and Local Food Producers Patricia L. Foreman First edition

There are a lot of books about chickens, but City Chicks is the ONLY book that tells you how to employ them using their skill sets. Urban agriculture is on the rise and City Chicks shows how to enable local food supply by keeping family flocks of chickens as garden helpers, compost creators, bio-recyclers, and local food suppliers. How-to detail throughout all 460 pages on keeping, employing, growing food for, and enjoying backyard poultrys. Chickens are the mascot of the local food movement. A desire for sustainable, clean, wholesome food and superior soil quality has led more and more suburban and city dwellers to keep laying hens in their backyards and gardens. Across America municipalities are allowing, and even encouraging, residents to keep laying hens within city limits. Learn how you can: Develop your own Chicken Have-More Plan. Have fresh, heart-healthy eggs, daily from your backyard home flock. Employ your chicken s skill sets as garden workers, organic pesticiders, herbiciders, fertilizers, compost creators and top soil enhancers. Become a chicken whisperer. Save millions of tax payer dollars by using chickens to divert food and yard waste from landfills and waste management systems. Be a Primary Poultry Health Care Practitioner to save on vet bills. The Poultry s Pharmacy shows you how to make and use effective, inexpensive home treatments. Draft and pass local laws allowing laying hens within your town or city. Avoid roosters and why you don t want them. Do much, much more with chickens than you ever thought possible, including outrageous chicken tricks. Learn how others: Have built urban chicken tractors, hen huts, condos and chicken chateaus to blend in with neighborhood landscape and architecture. Join in urban eco-agri-tourism with annual coop & garden home tours for fund raising. Start or join local poultry clubs. Keep small flocks to help preserve endangered breeds of chickens. Draft and pass local laws allowing laying hens within their town s limits. By the co-author of Chicken Tractor, Backyard Market Gardening, Day Range Poultry and the Co-Host of the Chicken Whisperer Backyard Poultry and Sustainable Lifestyles Talk Show. City Chicks is a revolutionary way of keeping and using chickens by thinking outside the coop and inside the gardens . Over 100 photos, drawings, and tables give visual clarity. The imaginative and entertaining style of writing is combined with handson, real-life experience to bring you one of the most complete and authorative books on micro-flock management. The chicken is still having her moment as the mascot and darling of the always-cresting locavore food movement. Many people are struggling to learn how, exactly, to care for her. Enter City Chicks; Penelope Green, New York Times, September 2009.