Chicky Queens for a day — Portland's Tour De Coops

On Saturday Tom and I took a Portland-wide tour of the city’s backyard chicken coups. The Tour De Coops is an annual event organized by Growing Gardens, a non-profit dedicated to creating and supporting gardens for low income families.

Each year Tour De Coops finds Portland chicken keepers willing to share their backyards and knowledge with the general public. Beautifully designed booklets with maps and details of each coop were just $10 and all profits help Growing Gardens with their community projects. There were somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 coops on the tour, we were only able to get to less than half of that in the 4 hours of the event. So much fun! We saw lots and lots of really great yards and chicken coops. It was exciting to see how creative people got with their outside spaces. I wish we could have visited all the coops on the list. I think my favorite was a cute pink coop with a chicken run that curved around a garden teaming with echinacea and sunflowers.

Saturday night we saw the documentary “Mad City Chickens” at Vendetta bar in North Portland. There was a raffle drawing Saturday night after the movie and I crossed my finders so hard they almost fell off. One of the grand prizes was one of John Wright’s “Modern Trailer Coops.” They are compact, beautiful, and very functional. We could actually visualize having chickens when we saw this design.

I was also so excited to finally get a tour of Zenger Farm. This urban garden is located on the site of an old dairy farm and is a volunteer based community garden. They have great programs that teach kids about gardening. We got to see chickens, turkeys, and bees and got a nice tour of the whole grounds.

Despite the crazy heat, we had such a fun day. It was just more proof that Portland is the greatest city ever. We are so happy to finally be here. I’m so proud to call this town “home”. I can’t wait for next year’s Tour De Coop!

More photos can be found on my Flickr account.