When my wife, Janet, came back from a ladies' weekend in Palm Springs and saw me installing a roosting box on the chicken coop I hadn't told her I was building, she gave it only a cursory glance before issuing a two-word decree: "No chickens."

This wasn't completely unexpected. When I built our first compost bin decades ago, she stood in front of it, hands on hips, and declared it to be "smelly and gross and out of here." And then she marched back into the house.

My five-gallon bokashi composting buckets holding mold-covered fermenting food scraps? "Totally disgusting. I'm not using that." The hydroponic tomatoes growing against a garage wall? "Really, really ugly, Dave."

She thought the solar panels were "hideous" and the xeriscape landscaping "apocalyptic-looking." While I was more than happy to give Amazon $15 every two or three months for a bag of bokashi, she learned how to make it herself from wheat bran, molasses, and root inoculant. And after reading a couple of books on hydroponics, she replaced the liquid chemicals in my tomato reservoirs with her own organic concoction. It's not that she's against doing the right thing for the environment; it's just that it takes her a little while to come around. But once she does, she owns it. 

The best advice I ever got about my decision to raise chickens came from my daughter Paige. When I told her I was going to build a coop while her mom was out of town, she said, "Build the coop. But don't get the chickens. Give her time."

And that's what I did. The coop became my field of dreams. Build it, I thought, and the chickens will come. To make the idea more palatable, I designed the coop to resemble our little beach bungalow home. It had the same roofline and tongue-and-groove siding. Completed in January, it sat looking rather forlorn until one Saturday around Valentine's Day, when Janet sorted through some old paint cans to find our house colors, grayish-green and black, and spent the weekend giving the coop two coats of paint. Then she designed a garden bed for the roof and, after I built it, planted creeping rosemary and orange mint and bushy marjoram and Thai basil on top, all edged with ever-bearing strawberry plants.

We had no chickens, it's true, but we had one hell of a good-looking chicken coop. Neighbors stopped by just to admire it. "It looks like one of those expensive dollhouses for millionaires' kids!" said Julie Ann, who lives next door in a very modern house with a big pool that takes up the entire backyard. "Are you going to get those chicken things to go in it?"

The weeks came and went. Still no chicken things, but we were starting to harvest the first of the strawberries. Then one Sunday morning in March, as we were reading the paper in the garden, Janet said, apropos of nothing, "They need to be good-tempered. Like an Ameraucana. Or a Plymouth Rock."

"Excuse me?" I said, putting down the sports page.

"I don't want any crazy chickens like the ones my mom had."

"I didn't know your mom had chickens."

"Oh, she had chickens all right."

That afternoon, the two of us drove out to a place called Chickens Galore and, after two hours of looking at just about every pullet the owner would show us, I got the cardboard box out of the car, and Janet collected up Patsy, Betsy, and Frida--two silky black Ameraucanas and a puffy Orpington. Back home, Janet spent the rest of the day spreading cedar chips in their roosting box and showing them how the drip waterer worked and where they might scratch for worms beneath the citrus trees. We've had "the girls," as she calls them, for a little over a year now. I think it's safe to say that she's gotten used to them. Sometimes she even lets me go out there and feed them. Sometimes.