Last year as I
celebrated the first birthday of Randy’s Chicken Blog, I announced that the
blog had just achieved 10,000 views.
Now, a year later I’m just shy of 30,000 views and am happy to have readers
all over the US, as well as a variety of other countries. Some of you are faithful followers of my
Facebook page, but many folks have read a single post on a single topic and
found that post through Google. I love
my followers of course—each and every one of you, but I’m also happy to provide
information to those people trying to get an answer to one nagging question.
There have been, if
you include this one, 132 posts. All of them
are always available in the archives, and they have covered every aspect of a
chicken’s life from hatch to death. Some
posts stray off topic a bit to talk about the woods around the coop and the
wild plants and animals that live there, or a few good books about chickens that
I’ve read, or the treatment of chickens on farms, or well…life, the universe,
and everything!
The subjects of the
most popular posts cover that same wide range, from stories about specific
chickens to information about egg cartons.
Here are thumbnails of the ten most popular posts from the past year
with links to the actual posts. Thanks
for reading them and stay tuned for more!
On Halloween Day
last year, I posted this article about the mystery of the unusual chickens in
South America. It seemed to me that it
would fit with Halloween if I gave it an outer-space theme. Paulette the Cream
Legbar modeled as the alien chicken.
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I’m proud of my
readers for embracing this post even though the subject is an unhappy one. It’s
so important for all of us to educate ourselves about the food we eat. In this
case, it’s a matter of looking at the labels on the package so you know that
the chicken you’re buying was humanely raised!
This one’s actually
not about chickens at all! It concerns
garlic mustard, a terribly invasive plant infesting the woods here at the ranch
as well as huge swaths of the US and Canada. While garlic mustard is crowding
out native woodland plants and destroying ecosystems around the country, it’s
also, as its name suggests, both edible and delicious. This post includes a
recipe!
The 7th most popular
Randy’s Chicken Blog post from the past year was one of the posts from the
continuing “egg carton series” where I look at the text and art on a variety of
egg cartons and use that information to see what I can find out about the eggs
contained therein and the hens who laid them.
This article was
actually posted originally way back in December of 2016 and didn’t generate
much fanfare at first. But it saw a lot of traffic over the past year and I’m
glad folks finally got interested because I think it contains some good info.
“Battening Down the Chickens” lists five important things you can do to prepare
your flock and your coop for winter.
“What in the world
is the deal with Betty?” I wondered. She developed walking problems, stopped
laying eggs and ultimately was cast out by the other members of the flock. Then
one day Betty started crowing.
At least once a week
I post a picture of one of the Hipster Hens in a feature I label with the
hashtag “#Meettheflock”. Needless to say, all the chickens gather around and
plead “Pick me! Pick me!” prior to that posting. Eventually, of course,
everybody does get their turn. Every couple of months I compile all the most
recent pictures together into one blog post for a cornucopia of pretty chicken
pictures. For some reason the “Meet the Flock Roundup” from last August grew
wings and took off. Not only did it receive waaay more views than any other
“Meet the Flock Roundup” but it became Randy’s Chicken Blog’s 4th most popular
post this past year. Why was it so popular? Naturally, each chicken featured
that month nods knowingly and says, “Well, of course! It was me!”
During the summer of
2016 Roxie the Rhode Island Red became infested with potentially fatal
flesh-eating maggots, a condition known as flystrike. As though this weren’t
enough this poor baby also was afflicted with sour crop. I chronicled my
efforts to treat Roxie in an October 2016 post that generated a fair amount of
interest from the get-go—perhaps from people Google-searching for ways to treat
their hens suffering from one of these conditions. That interest has never
really dropped off—this blog post gets viewed practically every day.
About a year ago, I
started writing my blog series on egg cartons, the eggs they contain, and the
hens that laid those eggs. I thought it would be fair to start out by talking
about my own egg cartons. I am not in
the commercial egg business, but I do provide eggs to a few friends and family
members, and there are Hipster Hen
Wonder Egg cartons. All of the posts in this series continue to be read and
continue to be popular.
This is yet another
entry in the egg carton series. It is not only my most popular post of the past
year, it’s also the most popular post I’ve ever put up on my blog. It has had
been looked at more times than my next five most popular blog posts combined. When
you Google “ALDI Gold Hen Eggs”, my post actually comes up before the ALDI
website. Why? I wish I knew. But I’m really happy that people continue to read
it and learn about egg cartons, the information printed on them, the eggs they
contain, and the hens that laid those eggs!
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