CALVIN has returned – and he’s nuts about, well, nuts.

For Calvin is the grey squirrel who regards our garden as his home and spends most of the autumn burying acorns and peanuts in our lawn, borders and – despite our protests – the vegetable patch.

It’s quite fascinating to watch him scurry back and forth from the piles of nuts and acorns (which I collect on my autumn country walks) and choosing where to put them.

Squirrels have fantastic memories and can always find where they put their stash, even months after they left it – well, almost always.

We have noticed this summer some peanut plants sprouting in our tomato pots.

Puzzled at first as to what the strange plants were, we pulled one up to discover the split peanut shell under the soil with the healthy plant growing from it.

The debate over the dinner table since then has been whether Calvin (no-one knows why he was given that name a few years ago) actually had forgotten where he put the nuts, or was simply unhappy with the service we were providing and thought he would try cultivating his own!