first frost

My husband came in from getting the paper with a sad expression this morning. I asked him if everything was okay and he just nodded. After a minute he informed me we had our first frost last night. And as the sun came up, sure enough, the grass was white. I thought I had a few more weeks, but thankfully I heeded his advice and had picked all of the green tomatoes off the vines. I guess it is truly time to mow down and plow up the garden.
Meanwhile, I need to find out if there's a special way to keep the chickens' water from freezing, other than changing it out several times a day. Here's a sample of our latest produce:
We know half of our chickens are laying (the large dark brown eggs, the light brown, small eggs, and the blue/green eggs) but there may be a fourth one, for sometimes we get light brown eggs with dark brown speckles. I like to think we have four of the six laying and the other two will start next spring, but who knows? So far there doesn't seem to be any pattern for when we get the eggs (although they do seem to be like me and are NOT morning chickens), though in the last week we've had at least one egg every day. We're still waiting for the day when we get more than three eggs in a day, though. Evidently one of our girls is supposed to lay white eggs, which we haven't had, so Bobby's wondering if she's an old bird past production, which is very possible (we got her a month ago, already grown). Did you know you supposedly can tell what color a chicken's eggs will be by the color if her ears? That's what they tell me, anyway.