Gardening with the Girls. Caring for my elderly chickens.

It’s November. Daylight savings has ended (UGH) and I have done as much garden clean-up as I am going to get to. I was helped - or hindered - in this task by my flock of elderly chickens.

I have been caring for chickens as pets for most of my life, and have a great fondness for them. The current collection is an assortment of breeds and personalities, who, with the exception of three adolescents from eggs we allowed one old lady to hatch this summer, are geriatric members of the garden community.

For most of the year they are allowed to roam free. In spring, when the garden is full of vulnerable seedlings, they are confined to a large pen, where they complain loudly and have to be compensated with offerings of meal worms and fresh greens. As the garden matures and can withstand their attacks, they are allowed out to forage and explore.

Come fall, when I am disturbing ground with my clean-up activity, they become my

overseers. They follow closely as I pull weeds and dead annuals, add compost to weeded beds and plant bulbs wherever I think I can fit them in.

There may be nothing more destructive, pound for pound, than a determined old hen. I

see them as the Visigoths - an invading army hell bent on sacking my flower beds. They hover over every turned forkful of soil. If I leave a freshly tidied bed for mere minutes, they have scratched and scattered dirt in every direction. Newly planted bulbs get thrown across the garden and tidy edges obliterated in their pursuit of anything edible. Forget eagle eyes. These girls can spot an exposed worm from yards away, and will fight each other for the spoils. I try to

distract them by turning up dirt where they can do no harm, but their ability to be right where they can do the most damage is uncanny. To protect the work I have done I deploy random pieces of old wire fence, refrigerator shelves and rusting barbecue grills, laid over beds until the soil surface has aged past its irresistible newness.

Right now, the chickens are moulting, and in their emerging pin feathers they have the

look of creatures from another era. Losing their feathers tends to coincide with the onset of cold weather, and I usually worry about them staying warm as their new feathers grow in. Not so much this year as we appear to be going past Halloween without a serious frost. Soon they

will be decked out in full splendor. They are free-loaders for the winter, but come spring, those who have not dropped off their perches from old age will be ready to trade us treats for eggs, with the promise of scouring the garden for ticks as well as my treasured seedlings.