The meadow across the street used to be a farm. At one time, strawberries were grown there. Some years, hay. The property passed into the hands of a church, and then to two conservation organizations, and half was developed as senior condos. When I moved here eleven years ago, the field was open. It was mowed, but not during bobolink season.

And then it wasn’t mowed. Invasive plants moved it. The wheelchair path got overgrown.

Budgets were blamed. The property was a low priority. Now the town and the conservation organizations want to control the weeds with round-up and other chemicals. Which is futile, really. Kill a buckthorn and another will pop up.

There was a meeting last night with the conservation commission and a (well-meaning) representative from the conservation organization. A number of neighbors showed up. We have offered an alternative. A friend with more goats than my two, will be intensively grazing the property. We’ll have a work party to clear old stone walls. We have a reprieve from the chemicals until next spring.

Meanwhile, there are brambles and grapevines, buckthorn, black-eyed Susan and bittersweet.  I know two boys who appreciate such things.

Free food for the goats.

It’s been well over a month since three of my hens went broody. Some hens are persistent broodies. They stay in the nesting box well beyond the three weeks that it would take to hatch eggs – that is if they actually were to hatch fertile eggs, which mine are not. Most of the time, they sit in their boxes without any eggs under them at all.

Betsy is a bantam White Leghorn. She is seven (yes, seven!) years old, hasn’t laid an egg in a couple of years, but, true to her bantie nature she still goes broody. Her preferred spot is in the rabbit hutch that has been claimed by the Ladies as their favorite nesting box.

Sometimes the big girls kick her out while they lay. Betsy lets them know how displeased she is, and then goes right back in to claim the egg after it is laid.

The hutch is not a safe place to spend the night because a predator could get in, so Betsy is put inside of the secure coop with the others after dark. She’s always in a bad mood, and she stays apart from the flock. Which isn’t much different than when she’s not broody!

There have been two persistent broodies in the Big Barn, Onyx (a Barnevelder) and Pearl (the splash Cochin.) They’ve been in the nesting boxes since mid-July.

Cochins are notorious for going broody, Pearl is very sensible about it. Daily, she leisurely gets up to take a dust bath. She hops out of the nesting box if I’ve tossed something particularly delicious into the compost pile. Although while inside of  the nesting box she’s huge pile of soft feathers, she doesn’t make a fuss when I reach under her to look for eggs.

Lately, she’s been out with the flock more and more. She might be over her summer brood. Maybe.

People worry about their broody hens. They think that they’ll starve. Never fear, the hens do get up and eat and drink, but it’s often when you’re not watching. You can tell by Betsy’s full crop that she’s eating just fine.

You can stop broodiness by putting the offender in an anti-broody coop. But, none of my three broodies were productive layers, anyway. They’re perfectly healthy. I just leave them be.

I expect that they’ll start molting any day now.

Chickens poop. A lot. A standard-sized laying hen produces as much as 4 ounces of manure a day. Chickens can’t control when they defecate. They go all of the time. They poop when they’re sleeping. It accumulates under the roosts.

Chicken manure is 75% water. It’s high in nitrogen. As it decomposes, it gives off ammonia fumes. (Which is a good reason to have your roosts well off of the floor of the coop – so your hens don’t breathe in the damp, caustic air while they sleep.)

Flies breed in rich, soft, moist manure.

I hate flies. They’re bothersome. They carry disease. In a rare case, they cause the worst thing ever – fly strike. I do everything that I can to limit the population of flies in my coops.

The first line of defense is the most obvious – remove the manure! I’ve written about manure management here. But, since chickens poop all day long, and you can’t follow them around with a scoop and bucket, you’ll have to take other steps.

Use bedding that is dry and absorbent. Pine shavings work well. A product like Koop Clean, which is chopped chaff mixed with a desiccant, is especially drying. There’s manure right in the center of this photo – dried out and so not a place that flies can breed.

If you have dropping boards (or, in the case of my Big Barn, a beam,) scrape the manure off daily. Despite the maintenance, during fly season, I see tiny immature flies on the damp wood.

I kill them with a spritz of citrus vinegar.

This summer, I saw those immature flies on my windows. But, someone else also saw them – these insect-eating insects! This is why I don’t use pesticides. Over the course of three days, these bugs (can anyone identify them for me?) scarfed up the tiny flies, decimating the fly population, and then were gone.

I’m a big fan of fly strips. Before those brilliant insect-killing insects appeared, the ones hanging over the goat stall looked like this:

Fly strips are very effective! (Just make sure that you don’t hang them where a flighty hen can tangle in them. Read about Florence’s adventure here.)

With all of my management techniques – a clean, dry coop, citrus vinegar, fly strips, and working with beneficial insects, I’ve kept the flies in check. Even late in August when the pests should be at their worst, look at this. It’s been hanging for 24 hours, and it had almost no flies to trap.

My hens thank me.