Poultry Farming and Exploring Portland
Our first stop after arriving at Portland Union Station was at our first farm stay, Sunny Side Up Chicken Emporium. One of our hosts, Steve, was kind enough to pick us up right from the station in his cool old Volkswagen van. As he drove us to his home, he talked a bit about the history of the downtown Portland area, the bay and the bridges. After a short jaunt, we arrived at his and his wife Suzanne’s house in the Southeast Portland area. We hardly had time to set down our belongings in our room before we began work on the backyard chicken farm, helping Suzanne put together our bed and doing evening chores before crashing for the night.
We soon learned that Suzanne has quite a busy farm life in her urban backyard. She raises several breeds of chickens, and has 15 separate coops that she keeps them in. Some of the coops are kept open during the day for the chickens to run free in the backyard and forage. These chicken lay eggs that we collected to sell for eating, and there were many colors of eggs coming from different breeds of hens. Most of the coops, however, were closed coops, because the hens and roosters in those coops were purebred and used for breeding, so that Suzanne could sell the resulting chicks to local backyard farmers. Suzanne raises the following breeds for sale as chicks: French Black Copper Marans, Mille Fleur Leghorns, Blue Wheaton Ameraucanas, Crested Cream Legbars, Lavender Ameraucanas, Olive Eggers, White Sapphires, and Cochins. She also raises ducks and turkeys, and sells their chicks as well. In addition to the coops outside, she has an incubation room in her basement in order to incubate and hatch chicks. Her garage also serves as a local neighborhood feed store, where she sells high-quality chicken feed, straw, wood flake bedding, feeders, and other necessities for the backyard chicken farmer. On top of all of this, she is also a part-time nurse, and works four days a week at a local clinic. As you can see, she is very busy, and was very excited to have our help!
She didn’t hesitate to put us to work around the farm. We learned the morning chore routine, which involved opening up the coops for the day, checking food and water levels, and bringing the roosters up from the basement to the coops. Because Suzanne’s farm is in an urban neighborhood, she has an agreement with her neighbors that she can have roosters, as long as they stay in the basement overnight so no one can hear their crowing in the morning. Unfortunately for us, our bedroom was also in the basement, which meant that all we could hear was roosters crowing in the morning, right outside our bedroom door! We also learned the evening chores of closing up coops and putting roosters in their individual crates in the basement, and how to harvest the eggs in the early afternoon. We spent most of our first days there working from morning until night, with only a few breaks in between. We helped with chores, cleaned coops, weeded and planted in the greenhouse, and did some yard waste cleanup. Mitch also helped Steve in the basement of the duplex they owned next door, spackling, sanding, and painting the ceiling with him over a couple of days. We managed to work our agreed upon 25 hours for the week between Sunday and Wednesday, so we had Thursday, half of Friday, and half of Saturday off. It was time to explore Portland!
Thursday was going to be a rainy day, so we decided to do some indoor activities. We bought a one-day bus pass, and rode the bus from place to place to stay dry. Our first stop was to a local Goodwill, so Andrea could find a good rain jacket, which she did! We then walked in the momentary sunshine to a nearby local board game shop, Guardian Games, just to check out their selection. After we thoroughly explored their large selection of games, we hopped on another bus to a local movie theater, the Historic Academy Theater. If you are ever in Portland, you should check out one of their local movie theaters. They have many of these small venues that often show second-run movies, as well as independent, foreign, and vintage films. The really cool thing about them is that they often sell locally-made food (usually pizza), and local microbrews as well. We had a great date night, watching Hidden Figures while enjoying a fresh slice of pizza, popcorn, and a local beer.
On Friday, we did a little bit of work, helping to fill buckets of chicken manure from a couple of coops so that local gardeners could pick them up and use the manure in their gardens. After we had finished cleaning the coops, we were free to ride our bikes around the neighborhood. We first stopped at the Woodstock neighborhood, which has some cute stores and a great coffee shop, Papaccino's, where we stopped to split a mocha and a cookie. We walked around the neighborhood for a while, then rode our bikes a little further South to hop on the Springwater Corridor Trail, which is a long trail that crosses the Southeast area of Portland. The trail was beautiful, and bustling with walkers, runners, and cyclists who were out enjoying the rare sunshine. We rode to the Western end of the trail, then into the Sellwood-Moreland neighborhood to check out an interesting local site, Share-It Square. This neighborhood intersection was the first in the world to be turned into a “community crossroad,” where neighbors could share space and congregate to talk and spend time together. Each corner of the intersection is a unique space. One corner has a decorated bench and a tea station, one has a playhouse, one is a neighborhood news board, and one has a little library. The intersection itself is painted with a new design every year by the neighborhood, and serves to beautify the space as well as encourage traffic to slow down while driving through. We had the chance to talk to a young lady who lives in the neighborhood, and learn a bit about how much the neighbors love having their community space.
After relaxing on the corner bench for a moment, we hopped back on our bikes to check out another local game store, Cloud Cap Games. They were much smaller than Guardian Games, but has a great ambiance, and a cute backyard patio. We learned that they host a lot of game nights for local kids who enjoy Pokemon and Magic the Gathering, and even have a Dungeons and Dragons game night for a regular group of eight-year-olds! It was great to see a safe, friendly place for children to spend time. Across the street from the store was a food truck corner, so we stopped in to one of the trucks to share a small meal. Afterwards, we rode back down the Springwater Corridor Trail and back through the Woodstock area to the house, where we settled in for the evening.
Saturday was another half-day. We did some work around the farm, then left in the early afternoon to ride the bus to Powell's City of Books, the world’s largest independent book store, for their International Tabletop Game Day celebration. While there, we got try out different board games, eat popcorn, and join in on an hourly game raffle. We took a break from gaming to check out the Rare Book Room, then played some more games until the grand finale trivia contest. There were five game prizes, that were to go out to the last five trivia players standing. Mitch joined the contest, and was lucky enough to be one of the last five players, so he won a game! After the event was over, we walked down the street to Sizzle Pie, where we each had a slice of pizza before taking the bus home.
On Sunday evening, after another day of work, we helped Suzanne make dinner, as we were having the next door neighbors over for dinner. Jean-Louis and Sylvie rented one half of the duplex that Steve and Suzanne own, and they had just moved to Portland from France in December. They were fascinating to speak to, as they were both from France but spoke fairly good English. We enjoyed meeting them and having a chance to talk and eat with them. It was a joyful, wonderful night.
Unfortunately, life at Sunny Side Up Chicken Emporium had not been as joyful and wonderful overall. We were having a hard time adjusting to sharing a living space with roosters and the farm’s sick bay, which contained two sick hens and a very sick turkey. The basement did not have good ventilation, and smelled very strongly of chicken waste and the birds themselves. There was a lot of dust and dander in the air, and we were having trouble breathing while we were in our room. We also felt uncomfortable and awkward around Suzanne and Steve, as they often argued with each other in front of us, and often about the work we were supposed to be doing. We decided that it would be best for us to find another place to stay, as we didn’t think we could make it through the month we had planned on staying. Luckily, Mitch had just gotten in contact with his second cousin, Dani, who lives on a small ranch in Western Washington with her mom, Charli (Mitch’s great aunt). They heard about our predicament, and quickly invited us to stay with them for the next three weeks. We insisted that we help them around the ranch, so they created a short list of things to do around the property. We were very excited to see them and more of Mitch’s extended family, but we had to break the news to Suzanne. She was very disappointed to hear that we wouldn’t be staying, but she understood the circumstances and our reasons for going. We worked on the farm until Tuesday, when Dani came to pick us up.
We were sad that we had to break a commitment with a farm, as we would have much rather stayed and learned more about raising poultry, but it just wasn’t a good fit for us. Thankfully, we are going to be spending time with family that Mitch doesn’t get to see often, and we’ll also get to see more of the beautiful Pacific Northwest by staying in Washington. We’ll tell you more about our stay on Azebrasis Ranch in our next post!
