Grdening : City Chickens Rout Garden Pests : Hens eat table scraps, lay fine eggs, cluck quietly and don’t bother the neighbors.
Yes, there are chickens in the city--if you thought you were hallucinating when you heard their crows early one morning--and some of them live in pretty nice neighborhoods.
Hancock Park, for instance, where Chip, Bomber, Tyson (all hens, misnamed as baby chicks) and Sabina (the rooster, also named before anyone knew better) make themselves useful by ridding the garden of slugs and bugs.
In many ways, chickens are a gardener’s best friend. What they eat reads like a who’s who of unwelcome critters, including but not limited to snails (which they shake out of their shells), slugs, earwigs (better known in California as “pincherbugs”), sow bugs, cutworms and miscellaneous caterpillars and inchworms.
In the Laurie and George Stoneman garden, behind an elegant English home beside the Wilshire Country Club, chickens play an important role, consuming pests and kitchen scraps and yielding potent fertilizer, plus enough eggs to make many a breakfast.
One Bantam Rooster
Because these are city chickens, they are all hens, except for the one rooster, and he is a bantam. Bantams are the subcompact of the chicken world, and Sabina has a pint-sized crow that neighbors hardly notice.
For city dwellers, hens are the best bet because they make no noise. In the Stonemans’ original order for a “Bantam Assortment” from a firm in Missouri were several noisy roosters that were given to a petting farm for children.
The trick is to buy only “pullets,” what poultry people call baby hens, so you don’t end up with roosters to dispose of. In the country of course, the roosters (called “cockerels” when they are chicks) become Sunday dinner.
As well as eating all sorts of garden pests, chickens take care of most leftovers and kitchen scraps. In return, you get eggs quite unlike store-bought, with rich orange yolks that “make scrambled eggs glow on the plate,” according to Laurie Stoneman.
Mail Order Eggs
It was the Stonemans’ son, Josh, who got them started with chickens many years ago, when he was at that age when animals, especially those that make unlikely pets, are irresistible to small boys.
They began with a “Purebred Bantam Assortment” of eggs ordered through the mail from Crow Poultry & Supply Co. (Box 106, Windsor, Mo., 65360-0106). They also ordered a small table-top incubator and watched the eggs hatch into a very mixed bag of old English game hens, booted cochins, silver-spangled Hamburgs and the odd araucanas that lay colored eggs fit for an Easter basket.
(One good way to learn about the various breeds of chickens and find growers who can sell you only pullets, is to attend the Los Angeles County Fair in September in Pomona, where one of the halls holds a huge chicken show.)
Chickens are legal in the city, at least the city of Los Angeles. That is perhaps the first of many chicken misconceptions.
Check Local Law
The city ordinance that applies (Section 53.59 of the Municipal Code), says that any number of hens are allowed as long as they are housed 20 feet from the owner’s house and 35 feet from any neighbor’s dwelling. Roosters, however, must be kept 100 feet from any dwelling.
To check ordinances in another city, call the appropriate department of animal control; not all cities are as wonderfully tolerant.
The second chicken misconception is that you must have a rooster to have eggs. Nope, only for fertile eggs. Hens are quite fine all by themselves, making only soft clucking noises that will not disturb even the grouchiest neighbors, with the better egg-laying breeds laying up to one a day.
Another misconception is that chickens draw flies. Actually they eat any flies attracted to their nesting area, and if they’re kept on the ground, where their constant scratching of the soil keeps things tidy, and if not crowded into some small coop, they are not smelly or particularly messy.
Keep Out Possums
The Stonemans keep their flock in a large fenced area on the ground, with nesting boxes for the hens and screening on the top to keep out possums and raccoons, though in most neighborhoods, dogs are the biggest threat and enclosures should be made of tough welded wire.
During the day, the chickens wander the garden, pecking and scratching, looking for bugs and little seedlings. “We don’t let them out right after planting anything as seedlings, but most of the time, they only eat grass and oxalis (a weed), and don’t touch the plants, but they sure keep the garden free of bugs,” Laurie Stoneman said.
At night, the chickens return to the coop.
“We used to spend hours running after them until we realized that as it gets dark, chickens fall asleep wherever they are and you can just scoop them up and put them away. Now they know the routine and put themselves to bed,” she said.
“I’m glad you’re writing about our chickens,” she added, “because now people won’t think we’re so crazy.” Certainly gardeners and those who like fresh eggs for breakfast will not.
