In its 10th year, the Silicon Valley Tour de Coop is highlighting urban farmers from Menlo Park to San Jose, whether it’s a “coopster’s” first time on the tour or their fourth.
The Tour de Coop is a free, self-guided bike tour of area chicken coops, beehives and urban homesteads. This year’s event is scheduled 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday.
Participating in the annual bike tour will give families and fowl enthusiasts of all ages the opportunity to discover more than 20 chicken coops. The Mountain View/Los Altos coop loop features five stops.
The coop owners have stories to tell of how they grew their homestead from a few plants or chickens to full-on oases.
Jan Johnston-Tyler and Joedy Clarin describe their Mountain View coop as a tribute to the area’s history as the Valley of Heart’s Delight. Johnston-Tyler has lived in the Bay Area since the 1960s and said she misses the sense of “living close to the land” that used to define the region.
“Many people who live here now don’t know what it used to be like,” Johnston-Tyler said.
In addition to free-roaming chickens, her garden features a beehive, native pollinators and several fruit trees – white peach, navel orange, Meyer lemon, honey crisp and granny smith apples, lime and apricot – around a custom chicken coop built by students from nearby Alta Vista High School.
In fact, it was the combination of the Tour de Coop, which Clarin read about in the pages of the Town Crier, one of Clarin’s co-workers looking to rehome four chickens and an old Alta Vista program that inspired and enabled the pair to build what they call their “Silicon Valley Micro Homestead.”
“As part of the construction class, if you paid for the materials, (the students) would build you a coop for free,” Johnston-Tyler said.
Their home has been a coop stop for four nonconsecutive years since they first participated in 2015, and their garden has grown according to their needs. For example, the beehive began as a way to pollinate the lackluster flowers in the yard (Johnston-Tyler said she used to pollinate flowers by hand, using a paintbrush) and resulted in 5 gallons of honey in their first year.
“This was all part of my evolving plan when I bought the house 19 years ago,” she said.
Protecting ‘Fort Knox’
Melanie Geleynse, a first-time coopster in Los Altos, similarly grew her flock of 18 chickens from an original six that her family adopted from a neighbor who was moving away. Geleynse said the chickens really belong to her daughter, who is in her third year at UC Davis and planning to pursue veterinary school after she graduates, inspired by her experience raising them.
“She would put (the chickens) on her shoulder and baby them,” Geleynse recalled.
The garden – which boasts blackberries and raspberries, figs, artichokes and plums, among other produce – surrounds a Dutch Colonial farmhouse built in 1898 and featured on Los Altos’ Historic Resources list. Although the family still has the original chicken coop they transported almost in its entirety from the neighbors who gave them their first chickens, they’ve gradually upgraded the fully enclosed run to protect their flock from foxes and hawks. Geleynse calls it “Fort Knox.”
The coops have automatic doors that open at sunrise and sunset to let the chickens in and out in the morning and evening.
“Chickens put themselves to bed,” Geleynse said, adding that the chickens will line up to enter the coop at night even if the door doesn’t open.
The family also built an automatic feed box – a hungry hen only has to hop on a levered platform to open the feed compartment – which deters rats and saves the family from having to feed the chickens every
day.
Tour de Coop participants can tour Geleynse’s, Johnston-Tyler’s and other coops during the first in-person event since 2018. (The 2019 tour was canceled due to a coronavirus affecting chickens, not humans.)
To register and for more information on the Tour de Coop, visit tourdecoop.org.
