For my own record

I had various packing tasks on my list for today but it was sunny so instead I started clearing a route through the garden for the builders. I live in a terraced house without side access but behind my garden fence (to the right of the orange wall in this picture) is a car park owned by a group of community-minded people and ages ago I negotiated access through their car park for the build. It has to be reconfirmed for the date the builder wants to start but I hope that at least this piece of the jigsaw is still in place. Until today there's been a thick plant screen between the back of the garden and the house, made up of a cherry tree I'd like to keep (thumbnail), two roses, a hazel tree and two spirea all planted far too close together and bound by a lot of ivy.

Today I've cut the spirea down to the ground - I have a hunch that they will fight back later. I've cut down all the thick trunks of the hazel and left the spindly new growth that was fighting upwards for light. If it survives I will keep it as a bush. I've removed the rose that was wrapped around the hazel root (bizarrely, just like the rose and hazel dug up last week).

I've cut masses of woody branches into short straight pieces and put them into next door's garden waste bin and will wait for all the leaves on the smaller twigs to die and fall to the ground so they can go into my compost.

What's behind/to the right of the cherry tree in this picture is the small tarpaulin protecting the shed stuff that I ousted yesterday then a million self-sown poppies which I'm leaving to be trampled. In the foreground are my four precious apple-tree grafts.

I didn't even bother to go indoors to get my camera so this is a blown-out phone picture.

Oh, and four more Freeglers arrived to collect things I don't want, including lots of wood offcuts. I was so pleased about those going that I came indoors to take down a kitchen shelf I made out of skip plywood two years ago so that that could go with them.

So today I have packed only one box. Maybe tomorrow you'll get the promised box-blip.

Knackered again.