Backyard Chickens & Bees

Last year, my parents put me in touch with one of the neighbors who rent out a property across the street from their house. The neighbor’s house has a nice, fully-grown apple tree in the front yard that, as far as I know, is an incredibly tasty Gravenstein. That fall I picked about 250 lbs [...]

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 [...]

So I wanted to add to my previous post about the bee-keeping class we took last weekend with Glen Andresen. My wife, Veronica, felt that it was overly technical and didn’t really express how fun and informative the class actually was, so I feel I should clarify that point. I really enjoyed the class with [...]

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, [...]