Catalog Cover

We’ve been doing the Chicken Dance bigtime around here!  Our all-time favorite Country Store – Jack’s, of course! – has gone into the chicken business (and ducks and turkeys and geese and guineas oh my!) via catalog order through Hoover’s Hatchery in Rudd, Iowa.  Free shipping, too!

The catalog has 59 brightly illustrated pages with catchy titles and interesting foul facts. The first 37 pages are devoted to chickens – all varieties from the practical to the fancy.  There are meat birds and egg layers, sex-links and hybrids, white egg, brown egg, and colored egg layers, exotics and bantams and probably more.  Nyel and I are hard-pressed to choose.

The sticking point, though, might be the quantity.  According to Hoover’s catalog, their minimum order for chickens is 15. When we saw that notation, our Chicken Dance came to an abrupt pause.  Farmer Nyel’s coop will accommodate seven, maybe eight girls.  Right now, we have four fat hens and so we’ve been pondering about which three or four more would be the right choices.  Eleven?  That would complicate our ‘backyard chicken’ situation right into a farm zone.  “Not going to happen,” says wise Farmer Nyel

Time to ask a question or two.  Will Jack’s combine the orders of us poultry minimalists?  And, if so, do we need to make outside arrangements first, or can we place our orders and hope for the best?  The order sheet doesn’t specify that the 15-chicken minimum has to be all one variety.  Presumably we could put in our order for four disparate pullets and our choices would be added to the numbers ordered by Jack’s other customers.

Catalog Basics

Which brings up another question – do those girls come from Iowa wearing ID tags?  I doubt that very much.  Our experience with chicks (and even with pullets) is that they don’t always look like their catalog pictures.  Kinda like me and my driver’s license photos.  Only mine always look bad whereas chickens who model for catalogs always look great.  The FAQ page doesn’t mention identifying labels, but it does answer the questions, “What happens if I have chicks that are dead upon arrival?  Can I get a refund or re-ship?”  (Answer – refund or replacement of birds, depending on number.)

We don’t know how all this will work out, but we are definitely doing our Chicken Dance in honor of Jack’s for providing yet another ‘Country’ adventure for us customers!  Jack’s Country Store!  Yay!