What a difference a week can make. Not only do we have an extra hour of daylight in the evenings – does that ever stop being exciting – but we are also in April.

Although I did wonder, during the recent wintery showers, if the clocks had gone forward an hour and the calendar back a month. When I referred to having all the seasons in one day, my brother retorted, ‘Where I was working, we had all the seasons in the time it took the kettle to boil.’

Despite the continued challenges of the weather, the gardens and ‘naturey bits’ are looking absolutely stunning now. I love this time of year, with the spring flowers and blossom taking centre stage, it’s just so uplifting. And I got really excited when I was walking through the woods last week and realised that we still have the bluebells to come. What a treat.

I have been busy sowing seeds in the greenhouse, and am looking forward to having a couple of days off over Easter to catch up in my own garden. My enthusiasm is a little curtailed by the amount of birds nesting around the cottage. It’s such a treat to watch them all setting up home – from the nimble little sparrows and blue tits to the cumbersome and clumsy pigeons who sound like a T-rex crashing through the viburnum hedge to their nest. I can’t help but laugh, as they look so nonchalant when they emerge from the evergreen screen, as they try to keep their nest site confidential – they are about as subtle as a three year old trying to keep their sweets a secret.

I’ve also got a pheasant hen nesting on the ground in one of the planned veg beds, so will have to wait for her to raise and evict her young, before I can reclaim that part of the garden.

Annoyingly, there seem to be a couple of r.a.t.s. around too, so I am relying on a neighbour’s cat to sort them out before they find the pheasant eggs. Apparently, the hot summer of last year meant that the rat breeding season was extended and even worse than that, the heavy rains that we have had can flood their burrows, meaning they seek often higher and drier places to set up home – like sheds and garages. ‘Shudder’.

Frustratingly, rats like the kind of habitat that hedgehogs and other wildlife like too, so allowing areas like this to develop will increase the likelihood of attracting the ’long tails’ too. Rats are ‘neo-phobic’, which means they have a fear of new things. They don’t like disruption to their territory, so place obstacles in their runs (if visible) can deter them, as can strong smelling plants like mint and marigolds. Planting mint willy-nilly will give you a different problem (possibly better than rats) but I have just sown a couple of packets of marigolds as back up for the neighbour’s cat.

Foxes are one of the most effective predators of rats, but I am already trying to dissuade them for the sake of my two tame hens - and now a nesting pheasant. Honestly, trying to ‘manage’ nature is the biggest juggling game of all. I don’t always understand it by any means but I like to think that nature can be cruel as a reminder that we don’t have to be.

And on that note: have an ‘eggsellent’ Easter weekend, try to spend some of it out in nature, or the garden, take care when tackling the DIY jobs and remember to keep the chocolate and hot cross buns out of the reach of dogs.