WALT DISNEY MISSED OUT
As time goes on, I think Walt Disney missed out on my life more and more. The boundaries between indoors and outdoors are becoming more blurred and I don’t just mean because of my aversion to housework.
As well as having several blackbirds and robins nesting in the garden, meaning I can’t use one of the sheds, access a strimmer or trim any hedges, I now have a little wren nesting in my porch – right next to my front door. I know we have been in lockdown but it does suggest I wasn’t using it enough! I have put a sign in the porch entrance to give her some peace and quiet, am using the back door and already dreading the stress of fledgling time.
I also have a nest of buff-bottomed bumblebees (or “buff-bummed bottombees” as a friend referred to them) in an old riding hat in the entrance of the open fronted barn – something I use every day. The barn, not the riding hat. The whole hat is humming cheerfully and the bees are absolutely no threat whatsoever – I actually feel highly honoured to have them share my space.
A family of rabbits are living under an old bath in the veggie patch – much to Yogi’s indignation – and I am paying the price of “loving having them around” with young plants as currency. Despite wire netting around various veggie beds, they are insisting that they have signed up for bed and breakfast, not just board alone.
Pigeons have stripped the leaves from my first lot of runner beans and mice have eaten my first sowing of peas. Slow worms halted mowing by basking in the long grass on the one sunny day we had last week and a woodpecker has recently tried to peck its way into one of my beehives for an indulgent honey-rich meal.
Yes, Walt Disney would have had more material here than he would have needed, for sure. And yet I wouldn’t have it any other way. I will net the next lot of beans, sow my next lot of peas in an old dustbin out of mouse reach and wait for my feathered friends to leave before I can access sheds – and my porch (you did read that right – porch, not Porsche.)