Hazel, I'd absolutely let the chickens into the garden and let them have some fun. Our chickens have access to the garden all winter because I leave the garden gate open for them and they go in and out of it as desired. They do a lot of digging and scratching and they eat a lot of weed seeds and overwintering insects, so I feel like having them in the garden is very beneficial.

I don't rototill my raised beds any more because of the negative effect it has on the soil structure, but back when I did rototill every spring, the chickens would follow right along behind me, digging and scratching their way through the soil and eating every insect they found. It was wonderful. They were just as happy as they could be when they saw us coming down the driveway with either the rear-tine tiller or, later one once the soil was more improved, the Mantis cultivator, because they knew that they were about to have some good times.

Squash bugs overwinter in garden debris, including mulch and spent plants from the previous season. An important part of cutting into their population includes cleaning up and disposing of all the garden debris from the previous year. I do always rotate all the squash plants to a new area every year because it means that overwintering squash bugs at least have to search for the new plants each spring. Hopefully while they are moving around and searching, I'll see them and kill them. Squash bugs don't bother tomatoes and peppers, but later in summer, their close look-alikes, stink bugs, will show up. In our garden we have both brown stink bugs and green ones. The strategy for fighting them is much the same---kill every single one you see, early and often, in order to protect your plants as much as possible for as long as possible.

Oh, and welcome back to your gardening family! I understand about the hillbilly internet. I've noticed we have tons of trouble with our internet service every summer. The internet service provider has tried to convince us for years that it is because our woodland is growing so tall that the trees and their leaves are blocking the wireless signal from reaching us, but I have noticed that our internet service begins acting up about the time the kids get out of school for the summer and it straightens up and becomes more available again as soon as the kids are back in school. Hmmm. Can't blame it on the trees then because they don't lose their leaves until well after school starts up again in late summer. I just think it is a fact that when the kids are out of school, we have trouble getting on the internet because it is clogged with more users than our hillbilly internet service provider can handle. It is frustrating, but I also think it is part of living in a fairly rural location where we're lucky to have internet at all. We are beyond the geographic reach of all the other local internet service providers, so we don't really have other options either.