Kittens stop play!

After an abortive wait for the roofer [why no courtesy call to tell us he wasn't coming?  If we weren't going to be there, he'd have been miffed, I suspect, if we couldn't be bothered to tell him, no?  Well, we travelled 20 miles to meet him.  NOT a good first impression.], we gave up and went to the garden centre in Bethersden to see if we could find a longer-handled pair of shears - success: their choice was the best we have seen so far, so we got some.

But not until I'd hacked into a nest of kittens [thankfully, I didn't hack into any kittens; I dread to think what would have happened if David had been clearing that part with the strimmer...] when I was clearing the brambles behind the other garage; I am trying to make it easier on Adam to fell our conifers, and creating access to the trunks seems like a good start.

Bucketful of kitties; before I put them back

[Am planning to clear an area in the woodland for him to leave the chippings when he shreds the leaves & smaller branches, but that will be easier, so am concentrating on getting to all the trees first.]

Four small, eyes-barely-open bundles of fluff effectively stopped Plan A.  I picked them up and put them in a trug, with the intention of finding a cat shelter, but as we don't know the area at all well yet, I ended up calling the RSPCA advice line.  They say to leave them alone, and the mother cat will move them...

So I placed them all back in their little indentation and headed off for the nursery with fingers crossed.

They were still there when we got back, so I started clearing more brambles, this time from behind the garage; I wanted to be close enough so that the mother cat got the idea that this was a poor place to rear her litter, but not so close that she wouldn't go near them.  I got totally caught up in what I was doing, so never noticed if any cats were lurking.

Oak branch, in the way

Not so much, now

It will sound counter-intuitive, but the logical way to clear the area of prickles was to chop up the fallen oak boughs, and so I started sawing up branches.  Then I needed a place to put all the inconveniently-shaped branches [not neat like hornbeam, which stacks pretty well], so I cut a few trees [well, saplings] down to have enough space to move.

It was like one of those puzzles where you move pieces around, seemingly at random, and eventually an image emerges.

The picture that materialised was the house!

Never really shifted too many blackberry stalks, but next time it will be so much easier and progress should be rapid.

We stopped for lunch, and ate it basking in the sun sitting on the cercle manoir, and then I helped David empty the last of the water out of the immersion heater which he had been siphoning out.  After another eight trugs-full had drained off, it was light enough to lift out of the cupboard; I'm keeping it in the shed in Maidstone so a) nobody can break into the house and steal it, and b) I can cut it in half and make two fantastic planters from weathered copper.

Clogging the shed till then!

After all that I checked the kittens, and could only see one, who was mewing piteously; I'm hopeful that that means momma-cat had carted off all his/her siblings and (s)he was worried about being left behind.  I will check again tomorrow, and keep my fingers crossed that's what happened.

So as not to be in the way of any feline rescue missions, I started by the outbuilding again.  I had been worried that the conifer branch might be dangerous, but seeing how tough even dead oak branches were, I carefully cut off all the brambles in front of it, whilst listening carefully for any ominous cracking sounds.

Outbuilding in there somewhere...

Success!

Again, the garden feels so much bigger, just for an afternoon's work.

The new shears were a boon - an extra 10" or so was enough to keep my arms far enough away from the prickles whilst being able to cut the briars at the base.

David checked the estimate for the electrics against the diagram, and the red duct tape we've used to mark the locations on the walls and ceilings; apart from a couple of queries, he thinks we've got it all covered.

Another productive day, and we were so grateful the 'Indian Summer' seems to have come back; fingers crossed for many more days like today - we're fine with a very cold start, if we can achieve a lot in warmth later.