Tour de Coops Recap

Well, we had the big Phoenix Tour de Coops this past Saturday. So incredibly fun and ridiculously exhausting. Those of you who have no clue what I'm talking about can read my last blog post on it here. In short, the Tour de Coops is a tour of the metro Phoenix area's coolest urban chicken set ups. This year we were honored to be a stop on the tour and loved showing off our coop and our girls. 

 

When the tour goers arrived, they put on a pair of blue booties and spritzed their hands with sanitizer. Chicken diseases are easily transferable and in the rare case that there were any sick birds on the tour, this ensured that all the other birds remained healthy and diseases weren't transmitted from coop to coop. A bonus is that those booties kept the chicken poop off of everyone's shoes!

We had about 200 people visit our coop over the course of the day. It was a great mix of people who already owned chickens and people who were thinking of taking the plunge. What a blast I had talking to them - it was fun giving tips to those who knew nothing about chickens and getting tips myself from old school chicken keepers. 

Showing this couple our "brooder"

The girls were a little bit nervous at first with all the people. Lucy and Effie stuck to the patio with the familiar faces of my mom and my sister and Flo hid in the bushes. Eventually, they warmed up and visited with the other folks. (Effie is molting which explains her wonky feathers right now).

In addition to learning about our chickens and our coop, a lot of the visitors wanted to learn more about our raised bed vegetable garden. Fortunately, my sister who is an Arizona gardening guru, was there to answer questions for us since we were so busy talking about the chickens.

Even Finley and Oliver had a great time. Finley managed to wrangle some kid into pushing him on his "tractor."

Talking all. day. long. seriously tired me out. I even fell asleep before the big USC/UCLA game (gasp!!). But it was so worth it - we had a fabulous time and are already looking forward to next year's Tour de Coops (but as tour goers next time around).