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The chicken coop is located about 300 feet from Lubavitcher World Headquarters in Brooklyn. It's part of The Crown Heights Homestead, which, according to Google Maps, is "permanently closed,"

Don't believe everything you read on the Internet. The Hasidic homestead was very much in operation when I visited on a recent frigid weekday afternoon. Emerging from the Kingston Avenue subway station, I walked over to the four-story building that is home to Daniel Yeroshalmi and his family. Yeroshalmi, 21, is a member of Chabad.

He showed me the 20 hens he keeps in his cement backyard and I watched as he retrieved a single egg from the chicken coop he built.

"I got a lot more eggs when they were younger," Yeroshalmi told me. "But as they get older they lay a lot less."

Built from bookshelves Yeroshalmi salvaged from a yeshiva renovation, the chicken coop is a demonstration of his tech chops, which extend into video production, social media and security surveillance. The insulated coop has an automatic door that goes up in the morning and down at night.

As I stood next to him and marveled at the chickens scurrying about, I felt my foot sink into something mushy. It turned out to be a huge piece of squash that had been left on the ground for the chickens to eat.

A local yeshiva donates squash and other produce that he feeds to the flock.

"Whatever they have that's going bad, they give to me," Yeroshalmi explained.

The urban homesteader also composts the yeshiva donations, as evidenced by a huge pile of eggplants and cucumbers decomposing in his yard. At the base of the compost pile on the day I visited were several esrogim, the yellow citron used during the holiday of Sukot.

"A lot of Crown Heights people don't know what compost is. They just wonder why I'm piling up vegetables in my front yard," he said.

His homestead may be Hasidic but the soil is too acidic to grow corn and wheat. Yeroshalmi tried.

He did grow 10-foot tall sunflowers. And his garden has yielded tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers, a veritable Israeli salad. There are cherry and fig trees, some of which were propagated from the branches of fig trees his family brought to America from Iran over the years. One of the fig trees is a variety known as the Chicago Cold Hardy Fig, but Yeroshalmi, who davens three times a day, is following the commandment known as orlah that forbids consuming a tree's fruit during the first three years.

Yeroshalmi's quest to make green things flourish in this Kings County soil started early. A 2012 Google Maps photo shows him planting radishes in the front lawn when he was seven.

"I think there's more of a connection between Judaism and plants than people think about," he told me.