www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVDXmUzuZUI

www.youtube.com/watch?v=stmQPaXGQzk

I SHOULD BE FORTHRIGHT and explain here that I have some personal experience with chickens, myself. Three years ago, I was living on a modest permaculture plot in a small town. Our next door neighbours were conventional chicken farmers, and they raised what must have been several thousand chickens at a time in a concrete coop that is apparently considered to be the industry standard for housing fowl nowadays. From right up close, I could see that their living conditions were absolutely atrocious.

I DON’T WANT TO ENGAGE in provocative hyperbole, but it’s hard to not make the comparison between these cruel cages and genocidal concentration camps. Certainly, from the chickens’ own perspective, they would not be able to see many major differences between the two. True, chickens may not be capable of making calculations in advanced trigonometry. But you know what? Neither am I… And in their ability to experience physical and emotional pain, there is no measurable difference whatsoever between a chicken and your Great-Aunt Shirley.

I AM NOT GOING TO USE this forum to advocate for a vegan lifestyle. Certainly, there are a thousand and one industries that cruelly use animal products when non-living materials would clearly suffice. But there are so many competing philosophies around human food consumption, and it seems that almost every other week another doctor or dietician comes up with a new regimen that purports to grant its practitioners maximum human health. So I definitely won’t tell you not to eat animal products, but I definitely will ask of you, that if you do so, to try to do it ethically and morally.

UNFORTUNATELY, FROM MY OWN perspective, there are not really any store-bought ethical options in the City of Toronto. Now of course ethics and morals are purely subjective, and not everyone is going to agree on how other species should be treated. But the point is that the industry is dominated by only a couple of massive agrobusinesses, who grow their chickens in horrid conditions. And the laws that strictly regulate the industry are tailor-made for these faceless corporations, so even if you wanted to band together and create an eco-alternative, you can’t!

AND FROM THIS SAD STATE of affairs emerges the backyard chickens movement. Historically, city slickers have peacefully co-existed with non-human animals for as long as there have been cities. It is only in the last sixty years or so that a sanitized version of suburbia has been pre-packaged and sold to the North American people, one in which there is a complete disconnect from our food sources, and our kitchens bear no evidence as to the origins of the animals we eat. And so nowadays our children have come to believe that slabs of meat are born already stuck onto styrofoam and wrapped in plastic… (and if Biotech has their way, they soon will be)!

BUT I REMEMBER YEARS AGO when I was looking for a place to rent in downtown Toronto, I saw a first-floor apartment in Little Portugal. The landlord took me on a tour of the house, and I was startled to discover a chicken coop in the backyard, with real live chickens in it! Apparently, this was not an anomaly; lots of Italian immigrants came over to this country and maintained their traditions of raising chickens for fresh eggs. Many continue to do so till this day. It’s officially illegal, but as long as the neighbours don’t complain, it remains unreported and everyone is happy.

IN THIS CRAZY, MIXED-UP WORLD we live in where food prices are rising all the time and we can’t trust the household-name big businesses to provide us with healthy and ethical food, it’s starting to make more sense for more people to think about raising chickens on their properties. And this has not gone unnoticed by the bureaucrats at City Hall. In a couple of months, they will be rolling out a backyard chicken pilot program in a number of neighbourhoods, to see how people react to it. Just like city-wide recycling services and compost collection: if it’s a success on a small scale, then they’ll expand it to the entire city.

AND TORONTO IS NOT THE ONLY city in North America that is considering amending its by-laws to officially permit small-scale urban egg farming. Dozens of American cities have already given the green light to backyard chickens: from San Francisco to Phoenix, Portland to Pittsburgh, Seattle to St. Louis, Chicago to Boston, Atlanta to Miami, Denver to Dallas, Los Angeles to Las Vegas; even the biggest metropolis on the continent, New York City, has A-okayed raising chickens in residential neighbourhoods. Even closer to home, in Brampton to the north, Guelph to the west, and Niagara Falls to the south, town councils have spoken with one voice: Legalize it!

SO WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? If you support the idea of legalizing backyard chickens, then please call you City Councillor and encourage them to co-sponsor a bill. If you’re open to the idea of raising chickens in your own backyard, then get educated, learn everything you need to know. And if you live in one of the neighbourhoods that gets the go-ahead to bring the chickens out from the underground, and if you’re ready to accept the responsibility and reap the rewards of having backyard chickens, then give us a call, and we’ll happily design and build you a backyard chicken coop!

For more information about raising chickens in Toronto,
check out TorontoChickens.com.

For more information about industrially-manufactured animal products, two excellent films are Fast Food Nation and Food Inc.

H E R B S

BEFORE YOU GET IN over your head, it’s probably best to start off with something small, like a small herb garden. No, it won’t fill your belly with a full meal, but it will add subtle and intense flavours to whatever you’ve got cooking on the stove. Or brew up a pot of tea from original ingredients that you know the names of. It’s kind of like getting a puppy to see if you’re ready to bring a baby into the world, know what I mean?

BUT IT GOES DEEPER than that. Historically, health care was not always state-subsidized, before there was such a thing as a state; and professional doctors weren’t always a phone call away, before there was such a thing as a phone! But in every community, there were always women and men who had immense knowledge of the local roots and herbs that could be used medicinally to effectively treat almost every condition, without invasive surgeries.

YOU, TOO, CAN HARNESS this earth knowledge and let food be your medicine, and medicine be your food. Dress your salad with vinegars made from homegrown herbs, infuse teapots with what’s growing in your garden. Cure what ails you by turning potted plants into tinctures, transform bay window gardens into botanical balms. Or relax your mind with aromatherapy by mixing essentially oils all by yourself. A cornucopia of plants eagerly await you.

V E G E T A B L E S

LET’S START OUT SIMPLE with something that’s already being done all across Toronto. The soil in this city is ideal for growing some of your favourite vegetables, and there are few things more pleasurable than walking into your backyard with nothing more than a big bowl and a pair of scissors to harvest a Sunday afternoon salad. Think radishes, green beans, cucumbers, squash, zucchini, garlic, lettuce, peas, and kale.

EVEN THOUGH TORONTO experiences horribly harsh winters, there are all kinds of fresh vegetables that can be grown in this climate. If you’re serious about taking care of a garden, then there are a number of ways to extend the growing season with cold frames and greenhouses. Either way, there are no shortage of cool-season vegetables that are both delicious and nutritious, so it’s certainly possible to keep your family well-fed on garden greens this far north of the equator.

WHEN THE SUMMER SUN starts to fade, that’s the time to start thinking about what you’re going to be eating during the winter months. Before the advent of refrigeration and transcontinental trade, what you ate in February was what you preserved in September. So after the August harvest, get out those old mason jars and start canning and pickling! You’ll be glad you did once winter sets in.

F R U I T S

FRUIT AND NUT TREES take several years before they produce food, so you have to have a long-term plan for the plot of land you’re living on. But if your children are still young and you plan to live in your house to a ripe old age, it’s well worth it to start thinking about the decades to come. In addition to fruit trees, there are berry bushes and grape vines that will go to fruit in far shorter time spans.

OUR SOCIETY HAS BECOME seriously addicted to glucose, fructose, and all kinds of highly-concentrated corn sugar derivatives that rot our teeth and turn our kids into crazy maniacs! Natural sugars in their proper proportions that come from fresh fruits are a healthy alternative that won’t increase your family’s chances of contracting diabetes.

FRUITS ARE ESPECIALLY versatile four-season foods. They can be dehydrated on drying racks, turning them into perfect between-meal snacks, or they can be canned into jams and jellies and baked into pies. And precisely because of their high sugar content, they can easily be fermented into an alcoholic drink of your choice, without any special knowledge of calculus or chemistry!

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In the next couple of blog entries, we will continue to explore the multitude of ways that your front and back yards can be so much more than ornamental trophy gardens. With a little bit of professional permaculture advice, your home could easily become a homestead on an eighth of an acre, if you’re interested in having more food security for you and your family.