I’m quite exited to show you the cover of my picture book, Tillie Lays an Egg. Yes, that’s Snowball. Her name was changed to Tillie for the book. It was a marketing decision, and I’m fine with that. Rather like how Lassie wasn’t really “Lassie.” In fact, Lassie was a boy (well, several boys.) At least Tillie/Snowball is a hen!

The book has already been reviewed on-line. One reviewer said that the book was “hilarious” and “a hoot” and another said that I’m “very slightly chicken-mad.” Slightly????

Tillie Lays an Egg will be available in January. You can check it out on Amazon now.

A cold front moved through this afternoon and all of a sudden it is goose-bump chilly, breezy, sunny harvest weather.

I picked over a hundred peaches from this little tree.

My fenced vegetable garden is behind the tree. Good-sized but not huge. I have raised beds, and pathways that take up a lot of what could be growing space. But it is a comfortable garden to work in and gives me plenty of produce. This time of year it seems like too much!  You can’t set it aside. It’s ripe. It’s ready to be eaten or cooked or preserved in some way. The good thing about chickens is that they are grateful for my sloth if I don’t manage to harvest or preserve everything.

What to do with all of those peaches? My favorite way is to simply eat them out of hand – they are tree-ripened, soft, fragrant, juicy. But I can only eat so many. About 20 got turned into two large pies this morning. More got stewed. Some became sauce. I dream of having more fruit trees. An orchard! But I can barely keep up with what I have.

I baked the Golden Hubbard Squash seen in last week’s blog. Something went wrong! I sliced it in half, scooped out the seeds, put it face down on tinfoil on a greased baking sheet and set it in a 375 degree oven. It’s how I always bake my winter squash. When knife-tender, I took it out of the oven, turned it over and found that it had baked up slimy. Yucky. Eww. What went wrong? Any ideas? The raw squash looked fine. Firm. Perfect color. Does it need to be stored for awhile before baking? Set on the vine longer? Help! Or the chickens will be eating a lot of Hubbard Squash.

Speaking of what the hens are eating – they are omnivores. In their minds, squash and bruised peaches are good, but bugs are better. I’ve heard of some hens eating baby mice, and I’ve seen mine eating small frogs. Lulu was scratching around on the lawn today and I saw her struggling to eat what looked like a large worm. I went over to check it out and was surprised to see that she was trying to swallow a baby garter snake! Tougher than a worm, I guess. After awhile, Lulu managed to get it down. She was one satisfied chicken.

I haven’t posted in the last few days because if I had, all that I would have written would have been a rant about the daily downpours, the window rattling from thunder, the soggy mess, the clouds of mosquitoes, the tomatoes bursting not with flavor, but swollen from water, the miserable basil complaining that they’re Mediterranean plants and not meant to have muddy roots. There. Boring, isn’t it?

But, today it is SUNNY and I hope that by evening I’ll have a ripe tomato.

The one plant that has exuberantly greeted the daily deluges is the Golden Hubbard Squash. This vegetable needs a lot of water. Look at it!

The girls don’t like torrential downpours, but don’t mind drizzle. They like drinking from puddles and they like to peck at sparkly raindrops on the fence. All of my chickens are hardy breeds. I don’t have to worry about feather legs getting muddy or a soggy top knot of feathers making a hen chilled and sick.

Candy is not so pleased with the weather. She has a toy in her hutch – a hanging chain with chew blocks and a bell at the bottom. The other day, bored, Candy positioned herself under the bell so that by moving her head a tiny bit she could get the maximum noise out of it. Lazy rabbit.

(If you haven’t already, read the August 1 blog first.)

Several people have written to tell me that they’ve also had a hen literally burst from maggots. We’ve all shared that same sense of guilt. How could one of our doted-on hens harbor such horrors without us knowing? I still can’t find anything written about hens with maggots in their vents. However, myiasis (the techincial term for maggot infestation) or “fly strike” as it is called in England, is well-known by sheepherders and other farmers.

Here’s why it seems to come on so suddenly – once the fly lays her eggs on the moist tissue, it only takes 20 hours for them to hatch. The maggots go through three larval stages, and with each one the clump of maggots increases in mass exponentially. Within three days you can have a cluster of maggots the size of a tennis ball in your hen.

The important thing to understand (and an area of much misinformation) is that although the flies will lay their eggs on a moist area, that the maggots themselves need dead flesh to eat. (Which is why maggots are used medicinally. For example, they clean-up gangrened flesh, but not the part that is healthy.) Diarrhea is a symptom not a cause of maggot infestation. Therefore, worms which cause loose stools are not a cause of maggots, and worming your flock will not help save your hen (although if you do have internal parasites, you should certainly worm your flock!) It might be that if you check your hen the moment you see runny manure, that you can catch the problem soon enough to save your chicken. But, I think that the real problem is an internal injury that you can’t see until it is too late.

Of all the people who have written to me, only one has managed to save her hen. Diana has an alpaca farm and a small flock of hens. Like me, she noticed a hen with diarrhea and set her aside in isolation until she could bathe it later that day. That evening, Diana was shocked to discover a gaping wound filled with maggots. She flushed the area with warm water and betadine and used her finger to pry out the maggots. She then applied antibiotic cream several times a day. Diana also syringed water down the hen’s throat to keep her hydrated. She didn’t feed the hen, so that there wouldn’t be fecal matter passing down the cloacae to dirty up the area. That lucky hen is still alive a year later.

My afflicted hen, Perrie, had too much internal damage to save. I didn’t want to prolong her suffering. Difficult choice. But if you keep hens long enough, you’ll face this if not other crises. I’m glad that my writing about this very unpleasant topic has made a few of you feel less alone in these decisions. One hencamer lost her son’s favorite hen to this very problem just yesterday. If I hadn’t blogged about maggots, she would have blamed herself. Hopefully, I won’t have any more such stories to tell in the near future. But if I do, I’ll tell you about it.

Broody hens looks so content and motherly, fluffed up on their nests. Just DO NOT disturb them. That puts them in a BAD mood. A broody hen in a bad mood wants to take it out on someone. But not on someone that might peck back. They still respect the pecking order. A broody hen in a bad mood is likely to do something that that very same hen, if not broody and if not in a bad mood would never do – like attack the innocent rabbit.

Eggers has been broody for weeks. She sits on everyone else’s eggs and doesn’t lay any of her own. I toss her out into the yard whenever I go out to the coop. Supposedly, that helps to break the broodiness. With Eggers, it doesn’t stop her broodiness, but it does turn that mild little bantam into a furious hen.

Today I put cantaloupe seeds in the chicken run. I set Eggers out near them. You think she’d be happy to be given such a treat. No, she looked around for someone that she could take her ire out on. Poor Candy. Eggers ran at her like a hen possessed. Pecked her butt and pulled out a big tuft of fur. Candy hopped off. Eggers followed and the hair flew again.

I know it wasn’t so bad for Candy. If it was, she would have hopped up into her hutch and that would be that. However, Candy barely moved out of range and resumed her implacable rabbit pose. She wasn’t about to let a crazed, broody hen get to her.

Eggers went back to her nest. It was empty: I’d collected the eggs. But that doesn’t matter to a broody hen. She’s settled in for the remainder of the day. Placid and peaceful.