they have been, as the article said, "trending" for a while in urban areas, as well as backyard chickens. It varies by region, of course, depending on the state of culture and a city's tolerance for such things as front yard gardens and permaculture in general.

So I guess the now done away with, Chesapeake community garden was not so far fetched for a company sponsored activity, as many thought it was ?

When the news media got hold of Chesapeake closing the garden , there was much ridicule of Chesapeake management. I never understood why it was acceptable for companies to sponsor a bowling league or a golf tournament, but somehow a community garden was off the wall.

LC Dollar - you must live near my old home. I owned a house on Indiana around the 8500 block. In back (the other side of the cement viaduct) the lots are large. I would venture an acre or two. I heard a rooster every morning. Sometimes he's started before sun-up.

The same place had sheep at one time. I found out (by accident) that if I would knock my spade against the metal fence post, they would all run to their feed trough. (I was just trying to knock off dirt!) Yes, I admit I did it sometimes just for giggles.

Interesting about the chicken ordinance being defeated again. I had to go to the newsok site to look at the article so will link it here in case anyone wants it.

I see both sides of the argument, for and against. My in-laws in Luther have had chickens off and on and they seem like a lot of work to me, but then again they have had quite a few more than the 6 max that would be allowed in OKC. I have to say, based on the way my neighbors care for their 4 dogs, I would not be happy if they got chickens. I shudder to think what a nuisance it might create for us. However, other neighbors (thinking of the ones that don't let their dogs out to howl every day at 5am and midnight, specifically!) might do just fine. So I can see why leaving that decision in the hands of the city council (even after neighbors' input is given) might be unsettling for some people.

Here is a link that might be useful: lastest chicken veto

Must chime in here. I was chatting with a employee at Trinity Haymarket (Dallas) last year. They were a distributor for Coyote Creek organic feeds, and I was having trouble locating hog feed for a friend. Anyhow, the fellow says, "Not much call of course for hog feed here." "What's hot there?" "Oh, we can hardly meet the demand for chicken feed and goat feed." "Really? Right smack in Dallas? Haven't zoning laws driven them all out?" "There are zoning laws against them, but the people don't care. They are raising them anyway." He said not only were there plenty of people raising chickens but there were even "micro-dairies" in Dallas.

p-mac, I'm at 93rd and Indiana, I think the chickens are between me and 89th, best I can tell.

and MiaOKC, I don't know why I did not add the chicken story as as a link, I pasted it in the post but forgot I could link it.

And I don't think I want anything to do with chickens, I've got more work around the house now, than I can get done.

Chickens are very quiet as long as you don't have a rooster around stirring up trouble and making noise. Mine only get noisy if something is scaring them, like a hawk or a bobcat or occasionally a water hose that they think is a snake. (No one said that chickens were smart, though they seem smarter to me than turkeys.) With urban chickens, where they are allowed, a person would have to have predator-proof fencing. I've heard lots of sad tales of urban chicken flocks being wiped out by dogs who escaped from their own yard and "broke in" to the chicken's yards and got them.

LCDollar, I always laugh when I read those articles on edible gardening, canning/food preservation and raising chickens (or other poultry or meat goats or meat rabbits) suddenly being cool and trendy again. As far as I'm concerned, they've been normal my whole life (I was born in 1959) and I've lived that sort of lifestyle all my life, whether it was trendy or not. : )

In our neighborhood in a suburb of Ft Worth in the 1960s and 1970s, we had neighbors (different ones, not all these animals were in one yard) with sheep, goats, meat rabbits and chickens. I believe they were grandfathered in when our suburb passed some sort of "farm animal" ordinance. I won't say everyone there had veggie gardens and fruit trees and berries, but almost everyone did. I just thought everyone lived that way.

Urban chickens have become enormously popular in the D-FW metroplex, so much so that some plant nurseries added poultry and poultry feeds/equipment and at least one garden nursery got into some kind of trouble for some kinds of chicken activities they were having on weekends. I don't think they let it stop them either.

This coming Saturday, one of my favorite Dallas-area nurseries, North Haven Gardens, is having their chicken sale, and the chickens will sell out fast. Who ever would have thought that you'd see chickens sold at a garden nursery? Our chickens are plain old country chickens, not urban chickens, which means we bought them at TSC.

Dawn

I hear ya Dawn. I grew up in the same small town I now live in. Everyone had gardens and many people had chickens.
After being gone for a quarter century for Uncle Sam, it was refreshing to come home and see a few folks still garden and a handful still have poultry and or rabbits. There are even a few goats in town. It is not like it used to be but it is still part of the landscape.
Now that we have the garden going my next project is the chicken coop. I am going to be rebuilding the coop my Grandparents used at one time.
None of that was ever trendy. It is just a way of life.

Robert

Robert, I agree it is a way of life. Sometimes I find myself explaining to "city people" (and I used to be one, but I always was country at heart) that gardening, food preservation and raising chickens isn't a hobby--it is a lifestyle. I'm not sure they'll ever understand it.

To quote an old Barbara Mandrell song, "I was country, when country wasn't cool." (grin) And, I can tell that you were too.

The "eat local" movement is huge in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex where all my family still lives. At the Farmer's Markets there, you can find all sorts of fresh produce, home-canned preserves, jams, jellies, salsas, etc., and every kind of artisan food product you can imagine made lovingly on a small scale by people like us who decided to make a living from their country lifestyle, whether they're beekeepers selling honey and beeswax, or small dairy owners selling their own raw milk (sneakily, to avoid upsetting "the law"), yogurt, and artisan cheese, artisan breads of all kinds, homemade soaps, salves and lotions, homemade candles, ...anything you can imagine, people are raising it, processing it and selling it. It gives me hope that self-sufficient folks like us always will have people around who want to know where their food came from, how it was raised, how it was processed and so on. I find it impressive how many young folks in their 20s and 30s are discovering all of this on their own because they did not grow up in a gardening or animal-raising family. They aren't just discovering it---they thrive on it and they are turning it into careers. I think maybe all the old ways won't die out, after all.

Every year I do a ton of canning in the summer, and then at Christmas time, we give gift bags containing (depending on how good of a summer it was) 2-4 jars of home-canned goodies to 120-150 of my husband's co-workers. It is a true labor or love. I never could figure out how he could share our excess tomatoes or pickles, cucumbers or onions, with all his coworkers in the summer without someone getting left out....since we wouldn't have an extra 150 tomatoes for him to carry in to work and distribute on a single day. By canning all that excess produce and giving it to them all at Christmas, everyone gets something and no one feels left out or forgotten. That's cool, but it isn't even the coolest thing. The coolest thing is that, over the years, an astounding number of them have fallen in love with gardening and food preservation too. Once they knew the joy of eating fresh plum jelly from plums grown on a tree in our yard or salsa made from veggies we grew, they wanted to learn how to raise food and preserve it themselves. It makes my heart sing each time he comes home and tells me about a friend from work who is starting a garden, enlarging a garden, learning how to can their food and, believe it or not....moving to the country to have more space for a bigger garden and some chickens. Who knew we could spark someone's interest just by sharing jelly and pickles, salsa and pickled peppers? When he retires, I'll have to really cut back on the size of the garden and the amount I can, because it will be just for us and our family after that.

I think our way of life is catching on, and a person doesn't have to move to the country to do it. It just is a lot easier in the country where people already have horses and cows, goats and chickens.....we just fit right in here, and I love it so.

Dawn

When I read that Backyard Gardening may be trendy. I had to agree, but it is a trend that is thousands of years old.

Larry.

Larry,

That is so true and your comment made me laugh.

Dawn

Dawn
One of the main reasons I garden as I do is to feed my family. I also hunt for meat and we gather wild fruits to eat and to make jams and jellies. I can't think of a more satisfying way to live.

Larry
That made me laugh but it is so true. We gardeners are just perpetuating a 8,000 year old fad. Maybe one morning we will wake and realize we are just following the 'latest' fad.

Anyone else watch " Alaska - The Last Frontier " on Discovery Channel ? Its a reality series about an Alaskan homesteading family, the Kilchers.

From what my Dad told me about life on the farm when he was growing up in he 20's and 30's, its similar to the TV show. They were almost totally self sustaining. I enjoy the show for that reason, it would be a very hard life, but there also has to be much self satisfaction in living from the land.

( Though, I've read that there's a grocery store not nine miles away from the Kilcher homestead, in the town of Homer, Alaska. Producers make it sound like they will starve if they don't kill a bear and a few deer :). )

And my Dad and his brothers left the farm , ASAP, after they served in WW II. Dad said the farm was extremely hard work, though he treated his gardening like he was back on the farm.

This is an interesting thread. I wonder when chickens were prohibited in OKC? I would think it was fairly normal to have chickens in town up until some time in 1930s or 40s?

I grew up in a very small town, but my Dad farmed. I grew up with a large garden, greenhouse, and varying sizes of tomato patches up to almost an acre. My Mom often canned green beans and made her own tomato and picante sauce. We had a basement which was an excellent place to store canned goods as well as root crops.

I'm 33 and I'm glad to see people my age and younger getting interested in growing their own food. However, some of them are so stinking arrogant and naive about it.

The way they talk about farmers who grow a lot of the food in this country is downright insulting to them. They insinuate that they are nothing more than ignorant hicks who are in the pocket of "the corporations".

They think if it's not 100% organic then it's going to give you cancer.

Then there is all the stuff about GMOs. I see my wife's friends on Facebook post things about certain types of commonly grown garden vegetables and GMOs. When I read reliable articles (not some random website) I learn that very few GMO types of vegetables even exist!

They seem to be ignorant of the basic theories of genetics that are taught in any high school biology class. I'm talking about Gregor Mendel and his experiments with peas in the 1850s and 1860s. You can change the genetics of all kinds of plants by cross pollinating, grafting and selecting for certain traits. By doing this you are modifying the genetics of the plant. It's how all these wonderful hybrid varieties of tomatoes I grow were created (not to mention sweet corn, squash and beans).

OK rant off. :)

Lol. Yeah, thousands of years old. Gee, what's the next trend, eating? Sleeping?

I haven't been watching it, but maybe I ought to.

My dad and his family were self-sustaining on their family farm during the same time frame, not necessarily by choice, but merely because they had no cash income. They were poor sharecroppers who were supposed to send the landowner (he lived in TN, having failed to make a go of things in western N TX) a share of what they earned on the farm, but he never got much because they barely raised enough to survive on and never extra had any to sell in order to send him his money. I guess he didn't really care---he let them live there many years, and those were mostly tough Dust Bowl and Depression era years when families struggled to survive. In surviving photos from those days, everyone is very, very thin and not smiling. It was such a hard life. My dad said that WWII really saved them---he and all his brothers went into the military and had three square meals a day consistently for perhaps the first time in their lives. None of them went back to the farm to live after the war ended, but instead found city jobs and careers that provided a steady paycheck. They all still gardened, as did their two sisters, during most of their adult lives, but it was more for the joy of doing it and for the pleasure they got from producing some of their families' produce. Both my aunts canned tons and tons of stuff when I was a kid, as did my grandmother, There is so much satisfaction when the jar of jelly on the breakfast biscuits is from fruit you grew, harvested and canned. We harvest native fruits and nuts on our property, and I've always thought the best plum jelly in the world is from the native plums.

My aunts could can anything, including stuff I'd never can or eat, but it came from that Dust Bowl mentality of canning anything edible because it might be all you had left to eat in the dead of winter. They also eagerly awaited the harvest of the first wild greens in the winter, and my Dad still raised lamb quarters in a corner of the yard by his compost pile in the 1970s and 1980s and poke weed as well. Being a more spoiled city kid, I never developed an appreciation for those native greens.

I think most of the homesteading type shows on TV are fairly fake or at least there are parts that are highly exaggerated, but that's because I'm a skeptic.

When I was in high school in the 1970s, we had to do a semester project in a "Black American History" class we took as an elective when we were juniors. The project my group pulled out of a hat was to prepare a traditional African-American soul food meal. So, off we went to the library to research that type of food. I quickly learned that poor white southerners, like my Dad's family, largely ate the same things that poor African-Americans ate during the same time period and that I had been eating "soul food" all my life. That was a startling learning experience for me. I had no idea that some of the traditional southern dishes my family ate were considered "soul food", and it was a great reminder to me that, regardless of the color of our skin, all of us are more alike than different.

Homesteading is a hard life, and I don't try to be entirely self-sufficient---not even close. It is enough to me that we have our own chickens and eggs, and raise our own veggies, herbs, fruits and flowers to the extent that we can. I'd love to keep bees and do more than what we do now, but not until Tim retires in a few more years and I have more help here around the homestead.

I can remember my parents saying, "and those were the good ole days, and we sure don't want any more of them".

Yes, I garden because it's trendy.......not because I'm waging a personal war against Bermuda or because I hate to mow or because I like safe food...trendy. That's why.

Okievegan, that's mostly the reason I've begun gardening too. I probably would not have begun gardening if I hadn't watched Food, Inc, 3 years ago. But the other reasons are that I've found that I really love growing things. And also I want to gain a skill that will make me less dependent on the food system.

You want the very most honest reason I garden? I sit in a chair all day and I would sit in a chair all night if I didn't make myself get out and go pull weeds or whatever it is that needs to be done. I can totally ignore the desperate call of house work....but living plants is a different story!

okiedawn, my parents also were raised in Pawnee County in the 20-30's. My father was a WWII vet and returned home, married my mom, leased a farm near Ralston, raised cotton and tomato's. Harvested the fields along side the "colored people" which was the appropriate term at the time. They both had wonderful stories of the people that helped them harvest, it was hard work, they were poor, had 4 children and farmed, they both spoke of it as the best time of their lives, my Mother even today at 87 has the fondest memories of those times. They moved to New Mexico in 1956 due to my fathers Asthma, he became the manager of a dairy company and that's where I was born. I like to say I was bred in Oklahoma and born in New Mexico. They did not farm there, but we always had a great garden, and Mom still loved to can and preserve. I remember buying bushels of apples and making apple butter, apple everything canned, frozen. We really had a great time, and she instilled in me a great joy of gardening and preserving.
I garden because it must just be in my blood, it gives me the greatest enjoyment, so therapeutic and I love the closeness of nature. I have a small veggie garden, but mostly I garden for the Birds, bees, and butterflies.
lisa_h I also really hate to clean house, I would be in the garden 24-7 if I could, I would rather mow the lawn that mop the floors! I can't wait to get outside this time of year, I do get the kitchen cleaned, but save all the housework for the hot part of the day.
I love the idea that gardening is trending. I got my daughter-in-law interested in gardening, she in turn got her Mother interested in gardening.
The great thing about that is they are both willing to plant native butterfly plants including milkweed and nectar plants in their garden.
Trending is good, for young people, let them call it whatever they want, as long as they are adding to the neighborhood habitat, we should encourage them to plant for birds, bees, butterfiles, as well as self sustaining vegetables.
Debra

This is a great thread and I must say I was never ever accused of being trendy...
kim

I do have to say that every time I see a news story about the latest known case of commercial produce being contaminated with E. coli, salmonella or whatever, I think to myself how lucky we are that we can grow a lot of our own produce and not have to worry about buying contaminated food. For me, the big wake-up moment that I should raise food crops as organically as possible was when I read how many times some kinds of conventionally-grown produce are sprayed. That was probably about 20 years ago. I never used many chemical pesticides, miticides or herbicides prior to that, but since reading that information I use almost none. You couldn't pay me to use a broad-spectrum pesticide of any kind, organic or synethetic in nature, on food we are going to eat. I count on all the beneficial insects taking care of the pest insects, and if I spray a broad-spectrum pesticide, it will kill some, if not all, of the beneficials. When you grow your own--whether it is food, herbs, or even flowers that you are going to cut and bring inside to use in flower arrangements--you get to control how much your plants are sprayed with anything, if they are sprayed at all.

Lisa, You're my kind of person. I can find 1,001 reasons, all related to gardening, to ignore housework and to, instead, spend hours in the garden. Housework is not my favorite thing to do. I do it, but I don't particularly enjoy doing it and I procrastinate and put it off as long as I can.

Debra, My dad and his family lived in Montague County, TX, which is sort of catty-corner to the western end of Love County, OK. He was born in 1919 and was, I think, 3rd youngest in a very large family of at least 10 or 11 children, some of whom died decades before I was born.

I look at how hot and dry the western end of Love County gets, and I marvel that my dad and his family even were able to raise enough food in similar soil and a similar climate to survive. My dad and all my aunts and uncles from his side of the family are gone now, but I feel remarkably close to them when I am gardening or canning. My love of gardening and canning came from them, so when I am doing it, I feel like they are still with me.

I garden for the birds and butterflies as well, mixing in plants for them in all my fenced garden plots (fenced to exclude deer and bunnies) and in other places too.

It is funny how one person can get so many other interested in gardening. I think that lots of people think that it is hard and that they cannot do it, so they don't even try. When you encourage them and help them understand how to do it, they become gardeners themselves, and then they pass on their love of gardening to someone else.

The veggie gardeners I know here mostly all garden for the butterflies, bees and other beneficial insects too, and largely avoid the use of all pesticides. I feel like we are making lots of progress in that area.

Kim, I agree. This likely is the first time in my life I've been trendy. And, when this trend has largely passed, I'll still be gardening and won't care that I'm no longer trendy. : )

Dawn

I just find out this morning, that the City revised their rules on backyard gardens, greenhouses, and compost piles this past December.

I did not know there were any rules :) , and I can't find the new rules on the internets.

I'm really afraid to find out, it probably involves getting a permit that will cost me some money. I was a little perturbed in having to get a permit to have my storm shelter installed, I feel like I spent $54 for nothing. But contractor would not do the work if I did not get permit.

Make it worse, I got a $50 parking ticket downtown when I went to get the permit :( , I got confused and parked in a no parking zone.

Here is a link that might be useful: Another NewsOK article on chickens

Alaska - The Last Frontier will be on Wednesday at 9 am CDT, its in reruns now. They've had three seasons.

Its a somewhat staged reality show, but its still interesting. These people have skills. The variety of skills a farmer needs.

They cut down trees to make lumber , to build houses, barns, or outbuildings. They can tear down and rebuild an engine. They machine parts for their equipment.

They garden, have a large greenhouse to extend their growing season, have cattle, goats, chickens, turkeys , and even a yak .

They fish for salmon and halibut to store for the winter and hunt deer, bear, and wild birds.

The only thing I've noticed that is necessary , that they can not provide themselves is fuel and products made from fossil fuels, such as plastics. They run a lot of internal combustion engines. And they have electricity, they don't say where that comes from.

But they have an outhouse.

I think its an interesting show about a life style that may be closer to what my Grandad and Dad lived. It looks to be a hard life and one my Dad wanted to leave behind. Dad joined the Army Air Corp in September of 1943. My Grandad grew cotton and peanuts, and Dad said he was thrashing peanuts one day and what seemed like the next day, he was in basic training, and he said that was a breeze compared to thrashing peanuts.

Here is a link that might be useful: Alaska - Last Frontier show schedule

Hmm, here is the article that talks a little about which restrictions on compost/greenhouses etc were under consideration for change, but I don't see one yet about the final results.

Here is a link that might be useful: urban ag

A newer article - but still haven't found anything on the City's site.

Here is a link that might be useful: More current urban ag

Thanks Mia, I did not see anything about a permit, so I'm good with it :)

I don't know how the City can possibly regulate what people put into their compost piles. That's micro-managing.

And I really think they should have bigger fish to fry, rather than looking over fences into everyone's back yards, making sure we are abiding by the " urban agrarian " regulations :)