In a recent online survey, we asked you how you felt about foods that contain genetically modified ingredients. Should they carry a warning label, so consumers can avoid them if they wish?

Here’s what our online community thought:  

Do you feel that genetically modified foods should be labeled as such?

1. Yes. The jury is still out on whether or not they’re safe, and I have a right to know. 457 votes (94 percent)

2. No. There's no health risk involved with GMOs, and a label would create the impression that there is. 27 votes (6 percent)

The message looks pretty clear: Consumers want total transparency when it comes to their food, and they should! Yet, according to the Institute for Responsible Technology, genetically modified ingredients are found in many everyday, unlabeled items, such as infant formula, salad dressing, bread, cereal, crackers, cookies, peanut butter and much more.

What do you think? Is your opinion in keeping with the poll results? How do you feel about the GMO industry in general? Let us know by leaving a comment below.

Spring is near and it’s time to order their chicks and other baby poultry. There are lots of things to consider before ordering chicks:

• Which hatchery is closest?
• Which has the breed(s) you want?
• Which has the best prices?
• Which has the best-quality chicks?

Everybody has a favorite. Which is your favorite poultry hatchery and why? Share the information in the comments section below.

If you want some help finding a hatchery, check out to our Directory of Hatcheries and Poultry Breeders or Hatchery Finder to help you in your search.

There’s a condition that inflicts some of us and I can only describe as Barnheart. Barnheart is a sharp, targeted, depression that inflicts certain people (myself being one of them) as harsh and ugly as a steak knife being shoved into an uncooked turkey. It’s not recognized by professionals or psychoanalysts (yet), but it’s only a matter of time before it’s a household diagnose. Hear me out. It goes like this:

Barnheart is that sudden overcast feeling that hits you while at work or in the middle of the grocery store checkout line. It’s unequivocally knowing you want to be a farmer — and for whatever personal circumstances — cannot be one just yet. So there you are, heartsick and confused in the passing lane, wondering why you cannot stop thinking about heritage livestock and electric fences. Do not be afraid. You have what I have. You are not alone.

You are suffering from Barnheart.

It’s a dreamer’s disease: a mix of hope, determination, and grit. Specifically targeted at those of us who wish to god we were outside with our flocks, feed bags, or harnesses and instead are sitting in front of a computer screens. When a severe attack hits, it’s all you can do to sit still. The room gets smaller, your mind wanders, and you are overcome with the desire to be tagging cattle ears or feeding pigs instead of taking conference calls. People at the water cooler will stare if you say these things aloud. If this happens, just segue into sports and you’ll be fine.

The symptoms are mild at first. You start glancing around the internet at homesteading forums and cheese making supply shops on your lunch break. You go home after work and instead of turning on the television — you bake a pie and read about chicken coop plans. Then some how, somewhere, along the way — you realize you are happiest when in your garden or collecting eggs. When this happens, man oh man, it’s all down hill from there. When you accept the only way to a fulfilling life requires tractor attachments and a septic system, it’s too late. You’ve already been infected. If you even suspect this, you may have early-onset Barnheart.

But do not panic, my dear friends. Our rural ennui has a cure! It’s a self-medication that that can only be administered by direct, tangible, and intentional actions. If you find yourself overcome with the longings of Barnheart, simply step outside; get some fresh air, and breathe. Go back to your desk and finish your tasks knowing that tonight you’ll take notes on spring garden plans and start perusing those seed catalogs. Usually, simple, small actions in direction of your own farm can be the remedy. In worst-case scenarios you might find yourself resorting to extreme measures. These situations call for things like a day called in sick to do nothing but garden, muck out chicken coops, collect fresh eggs and bake fresh bread. While that may seem drastic, understand this is a disease of inaction, darling. It hits us the hardest when we are farthest from our dreams. So to fight it we must simply have faith that some day 3:47 p.m. will mean grabbing a saddle instead of a spreadsheet. Believing this is even possible is halfway to healthy. I am a high-functioning sufferer of Barnheart. I can keep a day job, long as I know my night job involves livestock.

Barnheart is a condition that needs smells and touch and crisp air to heal. If you find yourself suffering from such things, make plans to visit an orchard, dairy farm, or pick up that beat guitar. Busy hands will get you on the mend. Small measures, strong convictions, good coffee, and kind dogs will see you through. I am certain of these things.

So when you find yourself sitting in your office, school, or café chair and your mind wanders to a life of personal freedom, know that feeling is our collective disease. If you can almost taste the bitter smells of manure and hay in the air and feel the sun on your bare arms, even on the subway, you are one of us and have hope for recovery. Like us, you try and straighten up in your ergonomic desk chair but really you want to be reclining in the bed of a pickup truck. We get that.

And hey, do not lose the faith or fret about the current circumstances. Everything changes. And if you need to stand in the light of an old barn to lift your spirits, perhaps some day you will. Every day. For some, surely this is the only cure.

We’ll get there. In the meantime, let us just take comfort in knowing we’re not alone. And maybe take turns standing up and admitting we have a problem.

Hello. My name is Jenna. And I have Barnheart.

Brooding baby chicks in cold weather — how low can you go?

As it turns out, cold-weather brooding can go low indeed. Back in the 1950s, when the electric companies were promoting electric brooding as safer, more reliable and more convenient than the coal and kerosene brooders that folks used to use, one group did a demonstration. The group suspended four heat lamps in a walk-in freezer set at a constant 20 below zero, and brooded a dozen or so chicks there. It was so cold that ice formed on the waterers on the sides away from the heat lamps, but within the circle of light the chicks were snug, comfy and did just fine.

The rule of thumb for overhead heat-lamp brooders is that one 250-watt heat lamp can handle 75 chicks at 50 degrees. If temperatures are lower than that, subtract one chick for every degree below 50 . For example, 20 below zero is 70 degrees lower than 50, so you would be able to brood five chicks (75 - 70 = 5) per heat lamp. With four lamps, the freezer demonstration could handle 20 chicks!

Stop for a second and realize how much more confidence you have in all-weather chick brooding now that you've grasped this little-known fact. And that's just a tiny fraction of the chick-raising lore I've collected in my book, Success With Baby Chicks. Don't forget that we all brood chicks in the late winter or early spring, when it's still cold!

It’s melting!! After the historical snow and cold the Midwest has experienced, sunshine, temperatures above 32 and puddles of melted snow are a welcome sight. Does this signal that spring is right around the corner? Well – not quite.

But as would be expected, this change in weather towards more hospitable conditions has triggered a plethora of conversation about seed ordering and starting, which catalogs are the best and just how much we each plan to grow this year. A group of us at the office have joined forces to order six different varieties of potatoes from Wood Prairie Farm in Bridgewater, Maine. The company offers 18 potato varieties. We’ll share the seed potatoes so we all can grow each kind. I have just 24 feet of space in my potato patch, but that shouldn’t limit the varieties I plant. It will be such fun in the late summer to dig up the potatoes and find a wide variety of colors and sizes.

Our editor-in-chief, Cheryl Long, designed and built a bookcase/growlight for seed starting. The office gardening group has plans to start some tomato and pepper seeds to get our gardening off to an early start. A seed packet always contains more seeds than I can use – especially with my four small 4-by-8 raised beds. I planted six tomato plants last year that grew like weeds. But they were so close together the tomatoes struggled to have their faces in the sun. By sharing the seeds and starting them here, we each can take home the number of plants we have room for.

To continue this share-the-load group effort all growing season, we’re considering gathering for lunch once a week to discuss our gardening successes and failures. As the weeks progress, I’ll share some of the most interesting developments with you.

How is your garden planning coming along? What are you doing to prepare? Let us know by posting a comment below.

In my part of the United States, you can't drive down a back road without seeing the remnants of an old chicken coop near a barn or house. Quietly decaying as time passes, they are visual markers of a time when almost every rural family kept chickens close at hand.

No matter where you plan to keep chickens, consideration must be given to housing. Chickens need a place to be protected while they grow, eat and sleep. Chicken housing may be as simple as an existing shed or garden shack, or as big as a poultry barn, housing hundreds.

The single, most popular small-scale housing solution today is the chicken tractor, a portable coop designed to house a small flock. I use the chicken tractor only during summer months as a method of starting young birds safely on open range. They benefit from fresh forage daily but are not free to roam, nor are they easy prey for hawks or stray cats and dogs. No matter what housing system you use, there must be a roosting space where the birds can be securely locked up at night.

If chickens are to be kept throughout the year in a colder climate, your plan must be large enough to provide them room to move when they are cooped up for several months at a time. A good standard for coop floor space is 4 square feet per bird. So, if you have an 8-by-8-foot shed, you can house 16 large birds throughout the year comfortably.

Nest boxes are necessary if you want your hens to have a place to lay in a predictable location. One nest box for every four hens is all that's necessary. Decoy eggs help to educate your chickens as to where you'd like them to deposit their own eggs. If there is a window in your coop, the nest boxes should be on the same wall as the window, as this is the darkest location. Elevate the nest boxes above chicken eye-level so they don't notice eggs and peck out of boredom.

Covered water and feed bins are also something you need to plan for in a coop. Keeping these things inside will greatly reduce the chances of wildlife or other animals sharing your chicken-dining facility.

A coop should not be air tight, but should reduce drafts and provide adequate shelter from cold, wind and rain.  A coop properly sized to the number of residents will be warmer when closed simply from the body heat of your chickens. The coop should be ventilated well enough to keep the inside dry. Adult chickens do not require auxiliary heat sources in winter, so save your money on those heat lamps and other energy-consuming heat units. Chickens that are well watered and fed are capable of generating their own heat as long as they are draft free.

If you want to get your creative wheels turning and need some chicken-housing ideas, consider picking up a copy of Chicken Coops by Judy Pangman. The book contains samples of chicken structures from simple and recycled to completely-out-of-control demonstrations of architectural artistry.

You can also visit my website for more coop information.

Photo by Frederick J. Dunn.

My friend David Ruggiero is working on a new project called “Upcycling Northwest.”  Upcycling, of course, is the in-word for smarter/better recycling, making use of the energy in the initial production of something, rather than using more energy to break it down into raw materials–or, as David puts it, finding “the highest and best re-use for the material rather than the easiest or most obvious.”  David is sure that there is more to upcycling than making arty handbags out of gum wrappers. With Upcycling Northwest, he’s trying to hook folks up with useful industrial castoffs.  And in Seattle, what better place to start than with the coffee industry?

A few weeks ago, David sent an email around to his many intrepid gardener friends, inviting us to try out coffee bean chaff–the light, airy husks blown off the beans during roasting–as mulch and compost.  I said “sure,” and it wasn’t long before David darkened my doorstep with a big bag of the fluffy stuff.

I admit I wasn’t feeling super-hopeful about the mulch idea–the chaff is so soft and light, and the winter garden is so wet and mucky–I thought I might wait until spring.  But David mentioned he’d been using it in place of wood chips in the chicken coop, and that captured my imagination.  Next time I cleaned out the coop, I replaced the white wood shavings with a few inches of coffee chaff.

The chickens were hilarious.  Like cats, they can be unnerved by novelty, and I wasn’t sure what they would think of their new chaffy home.  But they all immediately ran into the coop, and started “playing” in the chaff, tossing it up with their bills.  SO funny.  There are pros and cons to coffee chaff in the chicken coop, but on balance, I’ve decided to keep using it.  Here’s my report:

Cons: So light that it flies around, gets in the chicken water.  Turns slimy when wet.

Pros: Free!  Upcycled!  No link to the timber industry.  Smells like coffee.  Light–easy to handle.  Clumps with chicken poop a bit  like scoopable kitty litter–easy to remove from coop.  Swiftly composts.

Most coffee roasters will be happy to pass their chaff along to you. Just ask. Usually it is just tossed into the compost bin or, more often, the landfill.  Spent coffee grounds and over-roasted beans are often available as well (check out this little article by Seattle garden doyenne Ann Lovejoy about the many uses for coffee industry by-products–for mulch, compost, garden paths…).  Coffee chaff is rich in nitrogen and other nutrients, and I look forward to mixing it with my vegetable garden mulch.  Tomatoes are reputed to love the stuff.  David is also looking into the use of those great burlap bags in which coffee is imported as a replacement for that plastic weed-blocking material (see his website for info on obtaining and using post-coffee burlap).   More to come on all of this…

Meanwhile, if you are a latte-sipping urban chicken farmer, I hope you’ll give coffee bean chaff a try in your coop, and let us know how it works for you!

Photos by Tom Furtwangler

Lyanda Haupt is a Seattle-based author, naturalist, and backyard  homesteader/chicken keeper.  Her latest book is Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness and she blogs at The Tangled Nest.