The garden on 9 May 2026

It was a long and cold winter, a nightmare of a winter, and now spring weather is still cool. Usually by this time I have installed our air conditioner and it is hot outside, that's how the seasons work here, one day it's winter, the next day it's summer, but this year I am still putting on the furnace when I get up (it's only +5 C and overcast on 13 May 2026).The other day I looked out of the dining room window and there was the rabbit that visited us this winter, he was sitting in the garden and having a nice quiet time. Then a cardinal flew by and landed a few feet away from him, it scared the rabbit who ran away. There is a lot of life out there but you have to make your garden a place where birds, insects, and animals want to visit. As a Canadian writer said, "if you build it they will come." That was W.P. Kinsella. The crows are often flying overhead, sometimes they are eyeing squirrels that would make a nice meal for them. A few days ago I went out to put clean water in the bird bath--birds don't like dirty water--and everyday I leave a few unshelled peanuts in the bird bath for the crows--but this day I found something else in the bird bath, it was a squirrel's paw. Well, that's life around here, last year I saw a crow fly away carrying a dead squirrel. I am no friend of squirrels, they made life hell for a few years, there is no bird feeder here because the squirrels ate the bird food I would leave, and then the squirrels entered the attic and wanted to live there; squirrels can be squatters. The noise they made was terrible. At great expense I had their entrances closed up and that was the end of squirrels in the attic, although for a few years they would return to try to enter what had been their home, but without luck.

Squirrel paw found in the bird bath