Twiggy has been laying steadily for weeks, and the blue egg girls, Owly and Beatrix, have each, the last two weeks, been contributing eggs to the basket. Nancy Drew has started to lay lay small brown eggs, but I don’t always find them. I fear that she’s reaching around and eating her eggs as she lays them. But that’s another story that I’ll tell when I have all of the facts. Veronica is a Cuckoo Marans, a slow to mature breed. She’s plump and active but shows no interest whatsoever in the nesting boxes.

Misty, like Veronica, has shown no interest in laying, but all of a sudden, in the past few days, she looks so different, that I checked the calendar. She (and all of the Literary Ladies) have just reached 24 weeks of age. That’s egg laying age. Misty is a Blue Andalusian, a breed that lays white eggs. How do you know? Look at the color of her earlobes! Iridescent pearly white.

And her comb! In the past week it’s grown so huge that it’s flopped over. It rivals Twiggy’s for fashion drama.

Misty looks beautiful standing on the stump.

But I think she’d be more beautiful in the nesting boxes.

Just to the outside of the Little Barn pen are flower pots and ferns. There is also one very welcome resident. Do you see it?

During the day, this toad rests in a depression in the cool earth. At night it comes out to eat. Now that the HenCam broadcasts in the dark, many of you have seen it hopping in the chicken run after the ladies have gone to bed.

According to this site, 88% of the toad’s diet are invertebrates that are classified as agricultural pests, including slugs and wasps. Good toad!

Although wild animals often have short lives, and this amphibian is no exception, a toad can live a long, long time, up to 40 years. The hefty toad in residence near the barn is obviously well-fed and mature. I hope to see it’s handsome face for years to come.

Many times each day I walk by this planter. At first glance you’d think it an unremarkable black pot, and yet it is always changing.  Late in the season, I’ve pulled out the dying petunias, the black swallowtail caterpillars are gone, the dill is going to seed, and there are still a few strawberries ripening at the base.

Two days ago, something caught my eye. At first it was hard to see what glinted, and then, the light hit just so.

A spider had cast her web from the porch’s roof down to the dill. It was a classic web, quite large. I hope that she found flies to eat, but I did not see any successful entrapments.

By late afternoon, the wind picked up and the spiderweb blew away. For awhile the spider hunkered down among the dill tops. I don’t know where she is now. I’m keeping my eyes open. There’s been a lot of drama and change in that simple planter.

Three of the Literary Ladies (the pullets in the LIttle Barn) are regularly laying: Twiggy, Owly and Beatrix. I’ve also found, on a few mornings, a light brown egg. I’ve been surprised not to see more of those. Perhaps something was keeping the chickens from laying. Perhaps it was a very small, very determined, very bad-tempered bantam White Leghorn. Betsy has been ensconced in the nesting box for two weeks. She hisses at anyone who comes near. There are three nesting boxes, so I figured that she couldn’t keep the hens out. But, she is intimidating. I was deciding what to do about it, when I found her with egg yolk dripping down her chest. She had smashed another hen’s egg and had eaten all of it. Perhaps that was where the brown eggs were going. I tossed Betsy into the anti-broody coop, where she is currently sulking.

It will take about four days for Betsy to stop being broody. At that point she will no longer stomp around the nesting boxes in a rage, she will no longer break eggs and she will no longer eat them

I thought that I had solved the nesting box issues. But, early this morning I chanced to see Owly do something totally out of character. She chased Phoebe out from under the nesting boxes! Phoebe has made herself a cozy home there, where there’s not much room for more than a small rabbit.

The hens never go into Phoebe’s space. They never bother her. What the heck was going on with Owly? I shooed her away. She came back. I popped her in a nesting box. She determinedly jumped down and scooted under. I sat back and reconsidered. Why did Owly want to lay an egg under the nesting boxes instead of in them, where she’d been quite content to go for the last few weeks?

I’ve found that hens are sensitive to the angle of light coming into the boxes. The morning light is lower and hitting her favored box differently. Phoebe’s corner is darker and more inviting. Also, the pullets have been in and out of the boxes, the non-layers trying them out. They’ve kicked out much of the shavings. Phoebe’s hay was more inviting than a thin layer of shavings. So, I deeply bedded the nesting boxes.

I also returned the wooden eggs that I thought were no longer needed. When Owly saw the decoy egg and the fluffy shavings, she settled right into the nesting box (her favorite, the one on the right)

and within five minutes laid an egg. (The wooden egg is in the front, and you can see Owly’s pretty blue egg under her, still upright.)

She’s no longer laying pullet-sized small eggs. This one is large and beautiful!

Her work done, Owly went back outside to join her friends. But what of Phoebe, kicked out of her home? With the typical insouciance of a rabbit, she settled in elsewhere. No worries.

In the past I’ve been able to grow pumpkins and other hard winter squashes using a practice of benign neglect. The pumpkin patch is dug over in the spring, compost added, plants set into the ground and then the whole thing is ignored until harvest. One can get rather smug about one’s systems until things go horribly wrong, as they finally have done this summer.

Over the summer, the plants flourished. There was a jungle of huge pumpkin leaves. Weeds sprang up, too. Bees hummed. Sure, there were a few squash borers, but the plants still thrived. Squash were spied in the lush undergrowth. In the last few weeks, the plants wilted, from, what I thought, was typical fall mildew.

But a closer look revealed a serious pest hidden right in plain sight. Isn’t evolution amazing? The mature squash bug is exactly the same color as dead squash leaves. Train your eyes to look and you might see one.

Look again and you’ll see a ravenous, rampaging army. I cut off some infested leaves and tossed them to the Gems. They are even too nasty for the chickens to eat.

This late in the season, the squash bugs continue to lay eggs and multiply.

My system of letting the hens turnover the pumpkin patch in fall and spring to control insects helps to keep the borers in check, but it turns out that squash bugs overwinter as adults. I couldn’t just pull out the diseased plants and compost them, as that’s exactly the environment that the insects thrive in. The only thing to do was to bag up all of the plant matter (and as many insects as I could grab with it). The extension service info says that gathering and throwing out all of the plants will help to control the borers, too. Any bugs left on the ground will lack shelter and hopefully will die in the cold.

Underneath the weeds and the plants was a sparse harvest.

I’ve learned that mulch, even plastic, creates a safe haven for these insects. That bit of advice (read today, sadly too late) was proven true, as the strip of black plastic mulch I’d put in the pumpkin patch (because I had some leftover and thought I’d try it) was swarming with squash bugs, and the few vegetables there were ruined by the suckers.

At least the chickens were willing to help clean that up.

I’ve more work to do before I’ve got the squash bug infestation under control. I’ve learned my lesson that you can only ignore a garden for so long until the neglect catches up with you. But, with gardening, a failure in one corner doesn’t mean a failure everywhere. Last night friends came for Rosh Hashanah dinner. Side-dishes included honeyed carrots, tomato, cucumber and basil salad, chard with a dressing of lemon juice and toasted mustard and coriander seeds, and rice with minced herbs. All from the garden.