A nutty situation

How does one best deal with nut-seeking squirrels hellbent on tearing up the garden? Toby has a few ideas…

- Toby

HOW do you stop a squirrel digging up your lawn? Take away his spade: ba-dum cha! Alan Gardner, the star of C4’s popular series The Autistic Gardener, told me this gag – so you can blame him if tumbleweed is stuck to your chaise longue.

I had asked Alan about stopping squirrel damage as part of an SOS on social media – not for jokes, but to help my friend Ed, whose lawn has got more craters than Mars.

The damage has been done by a single squirrel that climbs down the fence to stash nuts plundered from Ed’s hazel tree. What makes the problem so bad is the double whammy of a beast with an unusually strong hoarding instinct and a bumper harvest of filberts. But ask Twitter a question, silly or not, and you will get lots of silly answers – and most of my replies were versions of Alan’s joke, including (just so you know): take away his hand-trowel/ pneumatic drill/JCB.