After a robust day on Friday of finishing touches for our yard and chicken coop, we were ready to roll for the 10am start time of the Seattle Tilth Chicken Coop and Urban Farm Tour. It was an unusual 90 degree day on Saturday, but Stone Soup Gardens had a wonderful turn out! We were leading tour groups through the garden and coop all day. It was great to talk permaculture with so many different folks, and to have them be so engaged with the urban farm aesthetic. A big thank you to the Tilth team who puts the event on every year. It's a fun event to be a part of, and an exciting way to introduce people to new and old ideas about gardening, permaculture, and chickens. Did you miss the tour? Check out the photos below for a look at Stone Soup Gardens headquarters! Saturday, July 12, the Seattle Tilth Chicken Coop and Urban Farm Tour will take place, and Stone Soup Gardens coop will be on the tour! What better opportunity to visit neighbors and other folks who are creatively incorporating animals and unique gardens into their home landscapes.
In this self-guided tour, you will see simple chicken coops built in an afternoon and elaborate finely-crafted coops that took weeks of planning and building. See what accommodations are needed for keeping miniature goats, ducks, mason bees, honey bees and bunnies. There are sites all around Seattle, including NW, NE, West Seattle, SE, and Central. This year, Stone Soup Gardens took place on a panel of awesome people who helped select the 25 best urban farms for Seattle Tilth! Prizes will be awarded and tourists will be able to choose the "People's Choice" Award for their favorite urban farm. Come on the Chicken Coop Tour and use your voting power! You will need a ticket for this unique adventure. Tickets are available HERE or HERE, online or at retail locations. A ticket will provide you with a map of the locations, as well as a sticker which shows that you are a paying attendee of the Coop Tour. Sign up today and we'll see you at the Coop! It may have been a typical rainy Seattle weekend, but a little rain won't keep a true Pacific Northwesterner indoors. This weekend was the Seattle Tilth Spring Plant Sale, and we had a great time! It is always a wonderful way to connect with our local community, show off our fabulous birds, and introduce them to a whole new generation of potential coop owners. See our photos below, and look on our Education page for more upcoming events with Stone Soup Gardens and our traveling coop! Stone Soup Gardens is happy to announce our recent relocation! It is an exciting transition for us, and one that will bring a host of new opportunities. Living in the Central District was a great start for our business, but we have moved south to Columbia City in order to expand as our business grows. We now have a proper office, an organized tool shed, a much bigger chicken coop for our ladies, and a big yard to develop! First, before we even moved in, we laid the foundation for our new tool shed, outdoor storage, and plant staging area. Gradually we moved into the basement and prepped our new office and indoor tool storage area. I can't tell you how exciting it is to have a space and a place for everything. We built a lovely new coop and run for our little ladies in the front yard. It has great access, shelter from the trees, views of the sidewalk, and a lot more room. We look forward to many happy years at our new location. Stay tuned for more information about upcoming workshops, classes, and photos as we continue to develop and change our new yard into an urban retreat.
Summer has been glorious this year! Here at Stone Soup Gardens, our days have been filled with raingarden installations, garden maintenance, and community festivals. It is a great time to see the bounty of what our northwestern climate can bring! It has also been a great summer for connecting with folks all over the city. As part of our business, Stone Soup Gardens is committed to providing continuing education to our community. Our aim is to spread the word about urban farming, edible landscaping, and cleaning up Puget Sound one raingarden at a time. Recently, I had the pleasure of giving a talk about edibles in the raingarden, in addition to sharing the joy of chickens to an audience at NW Solarfest. We had the privilege of opening for Cisco (by opening we mean speaking on the same stage 2 hours before his talk on attracting hummingbirds to your garden!) This summer the American Community Garden Association Annual Conference also took place right here in Seattle. The conference drew community gardeners from all over the country to talk about the challenges and benefits of growing together. Seattle Tilth was asked to host, and they in turn invited me to participate in a workshop for a panel discussion for Dollars and Cents in Community Gardening. The Seattle Tilth's Harvest Fair is this weekend and is a great opportunity to come together as a community. You will, of course, find us there with our fabulous birds in the livestock section. We will also be signing copies of Backyard Roots at the Reader's to Eater's tent at 10am. This is our first book appearance, but certainly not our last! This week our Stone Soup Coop Co-op were photographed for a book on chicken coops around the nation. Look for us there in 2015! It’s a great time of year for installing raingarden plants, prepping the garden for fall plantings, and getting your cistern ready for winter. Keep Stone Soup Gardens in mind for your maintenance or installation needs, or contact us to find out more about what Stone Soup Gardens can do for you! Upcoming and Noteworthy Events: Vandana Shiva at Town Hall Seattle The Future of Food - Thursday, September 12, 2013 - 7:30pm - 10:00pm Poultry Health Peeks - Tails to Beaks Wednesday, September 18 - 6:30pm to 8:30pm - 21 Acres Center for Local Food and Sustainable Living Instructor: Dr. Bruce Singbeil, veterinarian at Crossroads Vet in Bellevue, WA A group of folks attending my talk on edibles in the raingarden at Northwest Solar Fest 2013. Stone Soup Gardens at the Spring Tilth Plant Sale. Stone Soup Gardens often teaches classes at 21 Acres in Woodinville, WA. Here I am teaching a group of students about chicken rearing with a little hands on demonstration. Our mobile chicken coop! Can't come to the chickens? We can bring the chickens to you!
Hurray! The Tilth Edible Plant Sale is here!! (May 4-5th, this weekend, at the Good Shepherd Center in Wallingford. ) The girls and I are very excited to be returning as Chicken Ambassadors to one of our favorite Seattle events! This is the major fundraising event for Seattle Tilth which provides great educational programs on urban farming, animal husbandry, and does great work to further farm advocacy. Our birds have reached local celebrity status, having been on numerous tours to book clubs, harvest fairs, and they have now been featured in the Backyard Roots book by Lori Eanes. We thought it would be very fitting for each of the well-traveled ladies to have their own personal profile. Many people have enjoyed getting acquainted with the ladies, they are quite cuddly, and if you are planning on attending any of our upcoming events, you can address each of the ladies by name! COMRADE SASHA is a Rhode Island Red, which makes her an American born communist. Her sister, Karla Marx, sadly passed away recently. Sasha carries on with intelligence, and during our morning ritual, she will come and sit on our feet while we are preparing the feed. LOLA is a showgirl of a Buff Orphington with a lovely red comb. Lola is very sweet, was raised a free ranging lady, but has adapted well to community coop living. She will occasionally take turns with her sister, Shipoopi, to try and hatch unfertilized eggs in the nesting box. SHIPOOPI is a scrappy, cuddly, Buff Orphington, who desperately wants to be a mother. She will sit on unfertilized eggs for weeks at a time, foregoing food and plucking feathers from her belly to help warm the eggs. Her recent attempt at hatching fertilized quail eggs were unfortunately unsuccessful. BOBBI ANNE COUPON is a Black Sexlink with pretty auburn eyes. She really enjoys being held, and is one of the most cuddly girls we've ever had. She is easy to pick up and will often sit for 20 minutes or more with one person holding her. Her namesake comes from Jakes imaginary childhood friends, Bobbi and Coupon. MOUNTAIN ROCK is the most recent addition to the coop-op-a-loop-op. While we were installing a pollinator garden, a Whidbey Island family drove by and asked if we would like a chicken. Inside of the cardboard box was Mountain Rock, who had lost all of her sisters to a raccoon attack. The Seattle Tilth Sale will be her debut performance, and you will notice her by her red leg band. CHICKEN is a sweet Americana. GINGER MCKLUCKINS is also an Americana, intelligent and crafty. She comes from a broken home in Greenlake where raccoons climbed up and into her coop, and took her sisters. Ginger was able to escape and hide between the coop and the fence, where her previous owners discovered her two days later. After intensive therapy here at Stone Soup Gardens, Ginger can be a remarkably warm and loving chicken, though she still suffers from some PTSD. EGG DROP and DUMPLING, both Australorps, are the most youthful of our brood at one year old. These two are from an Australorp breeder, and began their days here by getting picked on by the others, but can now fully hold their own. Egg Drop has white feathers on her head and neck, while Dumpling is a rather rotund girl.
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