Fowl Play: Your Guide to Keeping Chickens in the City Now Available in The Urban Farm Guides' App and Hard Copy

Keeping backyard chickens is becoming an increasingly popular aspect of urban farming especially in urban areas, but for those who are interested, it often seems impossible to know where to begin. Why should I keep chickens? Is my backyard large enough? What kind of chicken coop should I build?

The How-To Guide, Fowl Play: Your Guide to Keeping Chickens in the City, is now available in the Urban Farm Guides' app as well as in book form. This short, yet thorough, how-to guide includes easy-to-read advice for everything from obtaining the chickens to their long-term maintenance and is written by urban farmers with plenty of experience in chicken-raising.

Why should you raise chickens in your backyard? "Think fresh eggs, the thrill of the daily egg hunt, and the chickens tilling your soil, eating food scraps, weeds, seeds, bugs and providing great fertilizer. Also, their great personalities offer endless hours of entertainment. My cats are entertaining too, but they don't make me breakfast," says Rachel Bess, Author, Fowl Play.

"You can learn so much about life from chickens," explains Michele M., a busy nurse, wife and mother of seven. "I've learned that keeping chickens really is good for my soul!" Anyone can do it...no roosters required.

The secrets to success easily unfold in the guides's pages where Bess provides a detailed explanation of the key components of a thriving flock of chickens: obtaining the chickens, building a coop, learning chicken vocabulary, raising chickens from day-old chicks, gathering eggs, and maintaining the flock, among others. Bess has plenty of experience raising chickens on her small urban farm, which is also home to rabbits and quail.

The How-To Guide is simple to read and is written in a playful and motivating manner so that readers can learn quickly while being inspired to start their own flocks. It can be obtained through the new app Urban Farm Guides, which is available at the App Store for iPhone and iPad or in hard copy at Your Guide to Green.

About Urban Farm Guides:
Growing one's own food can seem like a challenging endeavor, but the Urban Farm Guides make it simple. These easy-to-read and inspiring sources help readers learn topics quickly and successfully put them into practice. Currently, in addition to Fowl Play, described above, the app has the following three How-To Guides:

• My Ordinary, Extraordinary Yard comes free with the download of the app. This Guide shares the story of how Greg Peterson, transformed his own back and front yard into a thriving edible paradise and even touches on how he incorporated solar panels, greywater and rainwater into his landscape.
• Basic Seed Saving is a guidebook by Bill McDorman, executive director of Native Seeds/SEARCH, that offers step-by-step instructions for saving 18 different vegetables and 29 wildflowers, including everything from the beginner's basics to plants for advanced gardeners.
• Grow Wherever You Go is a tool to enable readers to discover where their garden "lives" be it a box of herbs on the countertop, a fire escape garden, or a complete edible landscape. This guide offers an additional source of inspiration for budding urban farmers through the personal stories of others who have maximized the potential of their own urban yards.

A variety of other fun and motivational Urban Farm How-To Guides are set to be released starting in January. Urban Farm Guides is now available for download in the App Store.

About Urban Farm
UrbanFarm.org is the home of a wide range of urban farming resources, education, tips and the 10,000 Urban Farms Project, which was created to discover a farm on every street. Founder Greg Peterson began gardening in Phoenix, Ariz. in 1975, discovered permaculture in 1991 and dubbed his personal residence in central Phoenix, The Urban Farm, in 2001. Peterson earned his Master's in Urban an Environmental Planning from Arizona State University in 2006. His long history of environmental learning and growing food in the city contributes to the success of UrbanFarm.org. Peterson wrote and published The Urban Farm Simple Sustainability Series, sits on the board of Native Seed/SEARCH and teaches the class Sustainable Food and Farms at Arizona State University. To find out more, visit http://www.UrbanFarm.org.

To post a comment, you must register and login.