winner winner…chicken dinner! Ok, maybe not. Or maybe in a round about way it will be a chicken dinner. That sounds a little bit morbid, I guess. What in the heck am I talking about anyway???  I thought I had written a blog post about this, but I couldn’t find one when I went back to look. So, let’s start at the beginning.

McMurrayHatchery-MysteryChickPhotoContest-Olaf-Langshan-1080x675Sue orders a lot of chickens from a hatchery called Murry McMurry Hatchery. They are located in Webster City, IA.  They periodically hold photo contests around a specific theme, like Springtime or Winter.  This Spring they held a “Mystery Chicken” photo contest.  From their blog post: For years, McMurray Hatchery has been including a free mystery chick with each order. It’s exciting to receive one and try to determine the breed as they grow. With over 100 breeds, our customers have received crested varieties, speckled beauties, olaf4.jpgfeather-footed fancies, and rare and exotic breeds. We had several “mystery” chickens that were photo worthy, so I set out to get some good shots. (I’ve actually used a few of the photos I took in various blog posts, but I guess I never really talked about the contest.) I loaded them up under Sue’s login, because I didn’t have one and don’t order at all – they had to be from the customer. Anyway, today I received an e-mail from the contest organizer stating that one of my photos had won!!! The photos are of Olaf, he is our biggest rooster – and he likes warm hugs. They congratulated Sue because she was the customer and I uploaded the photos under her name, and  her account then received the gift certificate… but now my photo is the White Langshan model on their website and will be in their 2020 catalog 🙂 Here’s the link to their blog announcement: https://blog.mcmurrayhatchery.com/2019/03/21/2019-mystery-chick-photo-contest-winner-announced/ Also, the $50 credit will be handy when we order the meat birds for next year… see: chicken dinner! I just thought I’d share that bit of fun news. 

For more information on regularly scheduled programming. We are done giving Scooby shots, yay! He was pretty much done as well. He seems to be feeling so much better and his leg is almost completely healed. We’re hoping that he’ll stay off the fences for a while now. We’ll see how that works out.

FullSizeRender - 2019-08-15T164549.341It’s been busy around here, Sue hasn’t had time to mow… too many other things going on. Today, when she came back from organ practice, it was raining – which is good, but not great for mowing either. She did take this great photo of the rooster, who we’ve been calling Partridge, hanging out on a really small branch coming up from the roots of the appleFullSizeRender - 2019-08-15T184123.639 tree. Can you find him? I’m making the photo as big as I can so you can have the opportunity to check it out. He was also one of our “mystery chicks.” Sue also took this great beautiful photo of the sunrise this morning, which is what I’m going to leave you with this evening; it’s time to give a couple chickens meds and start putting the rest of the chickens up for the night. I’ll try to check in with you again on Saturday. Until then, as always~
Thanks for reading!

Today’s Weather: It was a mixed bag. Temperature was 71° when I went out to help finish the chicken chores, high – around 1:45 was 97°, then it cooled off quite nicely as the clouds began to gather. Currently, at 7:47 p.m., it is 79°, under partly cloudy skies,with winds out of the southeast at 7 mph; humidity is hanging around 41%, barometer is reading 29.86 inHg (you know, I should graph that). NOAA says we had a tenth of an inch of rain this afternoon. Sunrise today (as pictured above) was at 5:45, sunset 7:01.

Egg Report: Wednesday – 37 chicken, 3 duck. Thursday – 29 chicken, 3 duck.