Even if you can’t keep roosters, you are usually allowed to keep hens. Vaccinated hens can be purchased with little effort. The best egg-laying breeds are ISA Brown, Orpington, Australorp, Sussex, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Leghorn and Plymouth Rock – all are large birds with large eggs. Hybrids are also available. There are many other breeds, but most are just for show. The Silkie, for example, is fun to look at and makes a good pet, but it is not useful as a layer. Many Bantams – often just mini versions of the common breeds – actually lay very well, but their eggs are just too small. However, they are an excellent choice for very small spaces.
This portable coop can be placed over garden beds once the edible plants have been harvested, allowing chicken manure to fertilise the soil.
Free-range chickens can be integrated with urban farming. They eat kitchen scraps and insects, and produce useful eggs and fertiliser.
Safe as houses
Chickens need a secure, lockable henhouse at night-time (as there are many creatures, such as foxes, which like to eat them); the structure should be dry (as chooks become very miserable when wet), well insulated, out of the wind and protected from extremes of weather. They can be permanently cooped up as long as they have access to patches of sun and shade – so they can regulate their temperature – and a snug, dry perch or enclosed laying box at night. A laying box is handy – otherwise the chickens will lay their eggs anywhere, often secreting them from you.
It is much more fun, however, if chickens are allowed out to browse freely during the day. Fresh plant matter means chlorophyll in their diet, and this leads to golden yolks with higher omega-3 levels. Grazing on insects provides both protein and occupational therapy for a constantly busy animal, not to mention free pest control for your garden. Free-range birds are happy birds, but you do have to protect young seedlings from being scratched or pecked by hungry chickens. Use chicken-wire ‘cloches’.
Chicken food
Pure grain is not a well-balanced diet for chooks, and it leads to wan, pale yolks (caged birds are fed colouring agents to disguise this). It is possible to feed free-range birds that have a large territory some wheat, as it supplements their diet. However, wheat and most other grains are deficient in calcium, so make sure your chickens have access to shell grit (calcium carbonate) as well.
Choose the larger size shell grit wherever possible, as it provides not only calcium content but also the grinding grit for their crop. This is the organ, just before their stomach, that stores the grit and, using a constant pulsing muscle action, grinds up even the toughest fibrous foods. It is an ancient organ. Fossilised piles of stones have been found with dinosaur skeletons in exactly the same position, at the bottom of the neck, as the crop is in chickens. It’s one of the main reasons chickens are such efficient converters of low-quality feed into high-quality protein.
Most commonly, hens are fed pellets that have been specially formulated for egg laying. These pellets have a mix of grains, including high-protein pulses, and supplementary minerals such as calcium and phosphorus. Laying birds need plenty of calcium and phosphorus, or they deplete their own stores and their bones become brittle. Layer pellets are cheap and ensure a basic nutritional sufficiency. The free-range diet is a bonus on top of this, but chickens can be kept on just pellets and kitchen scraps. Make sure any kitchen scraps are fresh, as rotting food is not good for them. Chickens will eat almost anything from the fridge, but not too much all at once. They love old butter, for example, but don’t give them the whole block!
Sure as eggs
Remember that egg production peaks in the first couple of years. It slowly declines until the poor old hen is just worn out, usually around the ten-year mark. In the good old days, hens would become ‘boilers’ – making excellent soup and stock – after about five years. We’ll leave it to you to decide if you are a pet owner or a farmer.
Many hens go ‘broody’, that is, they will jealously guard and sit on their eggs if the eggs are not collected. Although the hen will peck you and try to stop you, it’s important that you remove the eggs at least every second day or the hen will go broody and set. When they set (usually once they have six or more eggs), hens will not get up – they do not eat properly, they lose condition and they stop laying. The only way to stop this is to take their eggs away. You have to be tough with brooders.
Breeding chickens
Chickens are very easy to breed – all you need is a rooster. Actually, if you have a very broody hen, you can buy fertile eggs and be a breeder without having a rooster. Many people keep ‘brooders’, hens whose sole job is to raise the next batch of fertile eggs into chicks, rather than laying the eggs themselves. This is an excellent choice if you live in an urban area where you are not allowed to keep roosters.
Where you can keep roosters, it is always a delight to watch their antics as they corral their hens, tease the dog and strut around. Remember though, one rooster to a minimum of about six hens – otherwise the rooster bothers the hens too much. If you have too many roosters, they will cause the hens to lose condition and reduce laying – and the roosters may even kill the hens. Keep only the best and most vigorous roosters to continue the line, and sell the unwanted ones at local poultry auctions and sales. Don’t release them into the wild, as they just become a pest or get taken by predators. Transport them to your local market in strong cardboard or wooden boxes with the opening covered in chicken wire. Don’t be surprised if people are not buying them as pets, but do make an effort to ensure the roosters will be treated humanely.
This small, low-cost yet dry and secure house is big enough for half a dozen hens, which will produce plenty of eggs for an entire family.
For larger urban farms, a solid wooden henhouse for two dozen free-range hens is ideal. It’s important to lock them up at night to protect them from predators.
CONCLUSION: THE FUTURE OF
URBAN
FARMING
FARMING FOR TOMORROW
Everything old is new again. Agriculture and horticulture were the things that made urban life possible in the first place, and now many urban dwellers living in the concrete jungle of high-density housing yearn to reconnect with nature as well as the production of their food. Urban farming will never provide all your food needs – either now or in the future. However, what we are developing is a profound appreciation of what is involved in producing healthy and organically grown food (in the sense of it being free of toxic chemicals), and the ability to reconsider its value and necessity.
As well as doing our own urban farming, we can support farmers’ markets and community gardens, which will encourage more local and sustainable food production. The move back to ‘heritage’ food plants is starting to happen all over the Western world. In the next decades, urban farmers will be growing a greater variety of food plants – both heirloom species and modern hybrids – than ever before, ensuring that we preserve crop biodiversity for future generations.
DESIGN AND TECHNOLOGY
As more and more rural land on the edges of cities is consumed by urban development, it is vitally important that planning authorities consider mandating community green space so that developers leave enough land for not only green landscapes but also urban farms. Some developers get it, but many others don’t. When a landscape architect friend suggested the incorporation of a community garden for food growing, the astonishing reply was, ‘We want them shopping in our supermarket, not growing their own food!’ Obviously, it is up to councils to ensure that these kinds of developers don’t get their own way.
Planting heritage varieties helps preserve vital food-crop biodiversity, which would otherwise disappear.
Mixing urban greening with food production can improve the environment and create a serious amount of food.
As high-density housing becomes a reality for more and more people, it’s great to know that even small balconies can produce significant fruit and vegetable contributions for the table.
There is usually a divi
de in landscaping: ornamental plants over here, and crop plants over there. The Salad Bar by Turf Design Studio (see here) is a sensational example of how productive gardens don’t need to be simply utilitarian in nature – they can be integrated into modern garden design. We are starting to see food plants being used in landscaping more and more, and this trend will continue to gain popularity into the future. For example, many councils plant parsley and ornamental brassicas together in patterned beds, while fruit and nut trees make excellent park trees in towns and cities.
The continuing evolution of cultivation technologies means that we can grow food across all sorts of urban environments – both horizontal and vertical – using fertiliser that we generate from our own organic wastes and stormwater that we harvest from our roofs and other hard surfaces. Recent Australian inventions such as Composta (see here) and the Vegepod (see here) make the most of very small spaces such as apartment balconies, ensuring that everyone can grow something – even if it’s just a bunch of culinary herbs. Enterprising urban farmers build their own systems, often from recycled materials, and these creations are the basis for the next generation of innovative growing systems.
THE ONLY WAY IS UP
Vertical gardens (also known as green walls) are attracting a great deal of interest from urban farmers, as they utilise often-empty walls and take up little ground area. However, in researching this subject, it has become apparent to us that this method of food production is still a work in progress. There are many commercial growing solutions, but every system that we road-tested required a large input from the grower. Based on recycled plastic PET bottles, the vertical food garden (see here) designed by Sydney horticulturist Mark Paul is the most user-friendly system we have come across. We certainly see green walls overflowing with edible plants as one of the key directions for the future of urban farming, particularly as urban farmers work out new and clever ways to streamline the application of water and liquid fertiliser via drip-irrigation systems and worm farms.
Taking worm farms and urban farming to the next level – quite literally – we believe that in the not-too-distant future liquid fertiliser from large-scale worm farms could be used to feed rooftop hydroponic systems located on city buildings. Simple, lightweight plastic greenhouse structures could be erected to protect the cropping areas from wind-tunnel effects, climatic extremes and intense weather events, such as hailstorms. Operations such as these would overcome the current engineering problem of trying to accommodate and service garden beds comprising heavy soil or potting mix.
Another trend that is on the increase is the integration of crop growing with small animal husbandry, particularly chickens and fish. Horticulturist Mark Paul is working on a way to combine his renowned green-wall systems with fishponds. Water from the pond is pumped up and over the green-wall panels or pillars, and the plants actually clean the water as it trickles down and back into the pond. The plants use the nutrients that the fish excrete, while the fish enjoy clean water. On a small scale it certainly provides a very pleasing spectacle, but there is no reason it could not be expanded into a highly productive system featuring edible fish and plant cultivation.
PLANNING AHEAD
When Simon’s father was a child in South Perth, the river flats alongside the Swan River were occupied by Chinese market gardens. He often describes the utopia of vegetable gardens nestled among mulberry and fig trees, apricots, loquats and twisting vines; water-filled channels dug to the freshwater table for irrigation were filled with fish that the men fed and then caught for the pot. Guinea fowl had escaped from the nearby zoo and bred up into big flocks; Simon’s dad and his mates would catch them and take them home along with fresh vegetables they obtained from the gardeners in exchange for crabs they had caught in the river.
We don’t have to imagine such an Eden. With the right planning laws and an urban population determined to return to an idyllic life, such a place could exist again. We need to re-imagine green space in our cities, turning away from the current ‘turf and trees’ model and towards a botanic paradise of productive integrated gardens that cool our cities, recycle wastes, occupy people’s senses and reward urban farmers with fresh, healthy food.
As more and more people move to the world’s cities, more and more pressure is placed on our agricultural soils to feed them – and this is not sustainable as we march into an uncertain tomorrow. Put simply, urban farming is the only way to rebalance this equation – it allows us to produce valuable food while also keeping us in touch with the natural and agricultural world. It is essential that we plan for our future food needs and make space in our cities for urban farming in all its forms.
Urban farmers are starting to think outside the box, looking for new ways to make the most of vertical space in small gardens, on balconies and on rooftops.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Roofs and Balconies
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Plant Varieties
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Soils and Fertilisers
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J., Nut Grower’s Guide: The Complete Handbook for Producers and Hobbyists (Melbourne: CSIRO Publishing, 2005).
Worms and Compost
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Watering and Irrigation
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Handreck, K.H. and N.D. Black, Growing Media for Ornamental Plants and Turf, 4th Edition (Randwick: UNSW Press, 2010).
INDEX
The page numbers in this index refer to the page numbers of the printed book and are reproduced here for reference only. Please use the search facility of your device to find the relevant entry.
3000acres 202–3
A
Aboriginal Australians 18, 43, 45, 48, 57, 58, 59, 85
Grow Your Own Page 26