It’s no surprise that all three Buff Orpingtons are in the nesting boxes.

It’s even less of a surprise that two of the three are broody.

It’s easy to tell which hen is not. Amber (my favorite of the group) is about to lay an egg (good girl!) Her head is up. The other two are flattened out, chrrr-chrring bad-tempered warnings, and have glazed looks in their eyes.

Amber is on the left. Now that I pointed out the difference, it’s obvious, isn’t it?

Check out their combs, too. Topaz’s is half the size and paler, a sure sign that she’s not laying.

Of the three, I will be putting Beryl in the anti-broody coop today because in her deranged state, when she spies an egg in a nesting box she clambers over and claims it. She’ll leave one egg to go and sit on another. She’ll do this even if the laying hen is still there, finishing up. She shoves and stomps. She breaks eggs. It’s annoying and wasteful, so she’ll spend three days literally cooling off. When I return her to the coop she won’t be broody anymore. But, I’ll bet she starts molting. It’s that time of year (more on molting in another post this week.)

There’s one more broody hen in my flock, and this one might surprise you.

Betsy! She’s so diminutive that when she flattens out in the nesting box I have to peer in to see her. Both Tina and Siouxsie are laying. When Betsy sits on their two long white eggs she looks off-kilter, as if she’s going to fall off of them. Betsy doesn’t smash eggs and she rarely lays. I’m leaving her be.

This is the epitome of summer.

Sometimes I go and stand in my garden just to inhale that green tomato plants smell. In August that sharp scent is more appealing to me than any blooming flower.

This tomato is an Amish heirloom called Rose. I’ve never grown it before, and I relied on the scant tag information at purchase. “Large” it said. Right! The tomato pictured above weighed in at 1 pound, 3 ounces! At $4 a pound for tomatoes at the farmers market, this one hefty tomato has doubled my money back on the price of the seedling. When it’s a good year for tomatoes, as this one is so far, I can ignore the borer in my squash vines and the wilting cucumbers. The tomatoes carry the day!

The flavor of this Rose variety is better than Brandywine.  It’s so good that I’ve used the first few of the harvest simply for slicing and eating out of hand. But, soon I expect a whole lot of tomatoes to ripen at once. I’ll be making quick tomato sauces to freeze for use in the winter.

So far, my tomatoes are the stars of my late summer garden. (I’ll have to do another post on the cherry tomatoes I’m growing this year!) What are you harvesting that makes you happy?

My town’s newspaper is called The Mosquito, and for good reason. Despite being less than thirty miles from Boston, this community is small (under 5,000 residents) because much of the acreage is wetlands. In the summer it sometimes seems as if the main thing that we grow are blood-sucking pests.

This is why there is one voracious and unrelenting predator that I welcome to my yard. The dragonfly. The dragonfly’s prey of choice are mosquitos, gnats and deer flies. I’d hesitate to work in the garden without this effervescent beauty clearing the air of biting insects. The dragonfly ignores humans. It’s as if we don’t exist. It’s not uncommon for one to land on me, as if I were just another plant. For a moment it’s like wearing living jewelry.