I live in an apartment and like to grow flowers on my front porch. Most of the flowers I grow are annuals that I replace each year when the weather warms up in the spring. Since I don't have a lot of spare storage space inside I have to leave the pots outside once the flowers have died back. I usually clean out the dead stuff and push the pots close to the building, some stacked, some not.
Well last winter I did just as described above, and after about a week I noticed one of the pots, a long narrow planter has something that had dug in the dirt and made a mound. I didn't think much about this mound of dirt other than the fact that the digging had been so meticulous that no dirt had been kicked out on the cement porch. I thought to myself that who ever had done the digging had been really nice and not made a mess at least!
I tried to figure out what had been digging and decided that it must have been the squirrels burying a nut for "storage". After "figuring" that out, I didn't think ponder on it any longer.

This is the planter I'm writing about
Well the first semi-warm day the next spring I was getting ready to do some clean-up to prepare for new flowers. Instead to reaching down to pick up the pot I used my foot to scoot the pot over so I could work sitting down in my chair. Well, I had a surprise that nearly set me back a couple of years.
All of a sudden when I moved the pot out of the dirt came a mouse! I think it was more surprised than I, if that's possible. He jumped out and nearly climbed the wall! While I was hollering, then laughing, that poor mouse did what they usually do and tried run as far away from the shrieking lady as possible.
I felt so sorry that I had roused this poor mouse out of it's winter home that I just pushed the pot back up against the wall and left it for the rest of the month. I don't know if he ever moved back in, I kind of doubt it though because he probably decided that it wasn't worth coming back to a nest that moved around and had some lady bothering it.
