North Haven Gardens focuses on urban henkeeping

When readers cross paths with me at a garden sale or tour, guess what they always ask about. Not flowers. Not garden design. Not how to treat trees for webworms. Nothing about gardening at all, in fact. People want to talk about my hens.

I keep five hens, each a different breed, in my inner-city backyard. They range from 5 years old to almost a year old. When I acquired them, I thought of them as garden ornament. That's how uninformed I was about henkeeping.

My girls, they'd be proud to tell you, can peck a quart pot of Dragonwing begonia down to the nubs in under two minutes. Same for a silvery echeveria as broad as my outstretched palm.

On the other hand, their eggs have large, marigold-orange yolks; their soiled bedding straw turns up the heat in my compost bin and enriches my garden; and they can be counted on to trigger laughter in their humans.
Dallas is a city-chicken hotbed. East Dallas is the epicenter, but folks in Oak Cliff and North Dallas also are building coops. Still, I was surprised to hear that North Haven Gardens, a venerable, sophisticated garden retailer, aims to become your one-stop shop to set up your own urban flock.

On Saturday, the 58-year-old garden shop sponsors a seminar on backyard chickens. Farmer Dan Probst of Poetry, Texas, will explain what's involved in keeping a few hens (roosters are banned in Dallas): how to house them, what to feed them, how to protect them from predators and such.

At the same time, North Haven is unveiling its new inventory: a private-label cedar ark (a movable coop that keeps chickens corralled and safe from predators) for $399, feeders and waterers, supplements and electrolytes to help hens deal with extreme summer heat, hay for bedding and chicken feed. In a few weeks, says general manager Leslie Halleck, she hopes to have organic laying crumbles and chicken starter, packaged by a certified-organic producer in Austin.

North Haven will not sell chickens, but Probst will sell juvenile hens from his truck on Saturday. Probst, a former Oak Cliff restaurateur, has applied for his farm's organic certification. He raises standard breeds such as Rhode Island Reds, Buff Orpingtons and Barred Rocks, and the specialty breeds Silkies, Polish, Ameraucanas and Transylvania Naked Necks. If there is demand, Probst will sell young hens once a month at North Haven into autumn.

"I want to give Dallas an urban resource that's catering to the needs of urban dwellers with smaller spaces," says Halleck, herself a henkeeper of mere weeks. "We're very tied into what's going on in our community. People want their urban spaces to be more productive for them."

Backyard vegetable gardening skyrocketed this spring, says Halleck. "If you vegetable-garden, you compost. Why not have chickens, too?" Hens love castoffs from the garden and the cabbage loopers that invariably feed on greens; in turn, their soiled bedding and eggshells are composted. "It's a closed loop."

Halleck established a flock of five because "eggs are the only animal protein I consume, so I want the eggs to be the highest possible quality they can be," she says. "I feed my chickens a lot of greens from my garden. Their eggs are just about the most bright orange I've seen in my life." Halleck says she will switch from conventional laying pellets to the organic feed once it arrives at the store, despite the steep price difference.

She's already had to shoo a Cooper's hawk looking for supper out of her Little Forest Hills backyard. The young hens instinctively jammed themselves between the compost bin and the fence when the hawk swooped in. And though Ramona the Chihuahua quickly learned to run the chickens out of Halleck's newly planted hostas, she wasn't willing to confront the hawk. She yawned and looked the other way; Halleck says she had to lunge at the hawk herself to make it leave.

Consequently, Eunice, Einstein, Phyllis Diller, Pecker and Scooter are never set loose in the yard unless Halleck is there, too.

"People are interested in this, but they're afraid of not knowing what to do," Halleck says. "If you already garden and compost, it's not that hard to add chickens.

"I'm sticking my neck out on this," she adds, "but just because North Haven has been around a long time doesn't mean we're not progressive. Besides, I didn't see anybody else in town filling this niche."