No farm / homestead website is complete without an inspiring Vlog! Just kidding. I hate watching myself or hearing my recorded voice, but I was inspired to make my own video by chatting with a new online dog friend to go for it. If nothing else, it'll be useful to document our beginner farm experience. I was pretty anxious talking to myself so lots of misspeaks and repeats. It was my first time working with a real video editing software, too, and I was concerned editing all my mistakes would make the video unwatchable. Now that I'm done criticizing myself... on to the video!
I've had chickens since mid-2020. I'd been secretly wanting our own chickens for years. I'd first heard about it as a teenager when one of my friends got chickens in their suburban home in Plano, Tx. He said it was cool. I thought it was weird, but the idea stuck with me. We moved to southern Oregon in 2009, and I kept encountering people who had chickens. I visited a co-worker's home and got to look at his chicken coop. He said it was a lot of fun, and after seeing the blue & green eggs, I wanted some for myself. Brandon was harder to convince. He thought they'd be a lot of work, especially for him since he tends to take care of stuff at home. During the pandemic, one of other co-workers was also trying to convince his husband to let them have chickens. We fed off each other and bounced strategies around, using the food insecurity anxieties of the time to convince our husbands. It worked, and we both ended up with backyard chickens!
I promised my husband it would be no work for him. In order to keep that promise, I knew I had to make it as low maintenance as possible. I get lazy sometimes, and I didn't want our chickens to die because I had a low energy week or two. I spent a lot of time researching online in forums, random websites, and looking at chicken coop manufacturer websites before designing our coop. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, and I hope you enjoy the tour. :)
This video was made before we move onto farm-life. We currently live in the middle of the city, and this is our backyard chicken coop. I'm planning on filming our construction of the new (refurbished) chicken coop, too.