Backyard Chickens & Bees

Ah, last Saturday was the final CHIC gatherings for the year. This month was held at our house, and we had a near-perfect day for working outside (sunny skies, mid 60s temperature). The original CHIC date was set for last weekend, but several schedule conflicts had come up due to the long time in between [...]

Another month, another installment of CHIC! Actually, this is the last one until our place gets hit up in October. It’ll be nice for the households with kids to not have to worry about working in the CHIC schedule to camp and vacation time, and I’ll be happy to have a few months to work [...]

Last Saturday was May CHIC day here in the fabulous Sabin neighborhood. This month’s workday was held at Jim and Harriet’s place, and was spent outdoors in the fabulous Spring weather. Harriet set a precedent this month by putting together a chart to organize all the activities and ensure that tasks were completed in a [...]

Yesterday was our April CHIC day over at Ben and Carol’s house. The projects that we worked on this month included building a shed (or at least getting some work done on the building of the shed), installing two raised beds, pulling out a lot of old rosemary and sage, etc, and putting in some [...]

Well, this past weekend was dedicated to the March CHIC (Community Home Improvement Collective) and additional work on building the new chicken coop. We worked at Matt and Kristin’s place this month (they are my immediate neighbors to the South), with a long laundry-list of tasks to complete, including a full remodel of the chicken [...]

Yesterday we had our first official CHIC workday of 2009. CHIC is a micro-local Community Home Improvement Collective (I pronounce it ‘chick’, not ‘sheek’) that is composed of several neighbors from my block in the Sabin Neighborhood of NE Portland. Ten people, total. This was started last year by (I think) Carol, up the block, [...]

We met up with our neighbors today to discuss the second year of CHIC, which is a community effort to spend four hours once a month doing whatever work needs to be done at one household from the group. We have five households in the group—giving us ten hard-working adults to clean, build, shovel, and [...]