After some unplanned sight-seeing around the cul-de-sac to find the right door number, Beth and Andy arrived at Ms M’s garden. We were greeted by the all too familiar sight of a sea of a weedy overrun garden – as well as a highly inquisitive kitten (Trevor*) who had popped over the fence from next door to provide some critical project management, supervision and the all-important health and safety briefing.

A purr-fect Sunday morning for a spot of gardening

We got ourselves acquainted with Trevor (who seemed to be having a game of deliberately looking away from the camera), and began to assess the task at hand. After giving Trevor a chance to complete a thorough examination of our gloves and tools, we were ready to get stuck in. Ms M had been visited by a couple of other GoodGym’ers earlier in the year, so the weedy gravel membrane hadn’t had too much of a chance to take a hold.

The kitten was smitten by the mitten (aka gardening glove)

With Beth leaving one glove for Trevor to play with, we each grabbed a black bin bag and got to work on the overrun garden. Due to all the recent rain, the ground was nice and soft, and we were quickly pulling up handfuls of weeds, and slightly more carefully extracted spiky thistles.

Thistle be the end of us

Andy came up against a prickly problem as he came face-to-face with numerous thistles bunched together. “Thistle only take a second” Andy exclaimed as he began to pull on the roots. True to his word the thistles were out and Andy had a thistle-y trophy in his hands.

We had to take lots of paw-ses to check on Trevor

Throughout the mission both Andy and Beth made sure to check Trevor was out of harm’s way and not hanging from the fence line or bench. As they worked away his technique of falling down the gap in the bench seemed to be improving (well, involving less frantic scrabbling at least) – no doubt he would benefit from some core and upper body exercises from Ana by coming along to GoodGym Hounslow some time!

90 minutes later, we were happy weed’id a good job and there was nothing else unwanted that needed pulling up. With a stack of 8 stuffed bin bags, and a transformed garden in-front of us, we present our effort to Trevor, who signed it off with a swish of his tail.

The kitten was in (g)love with his newly cleared space

We took the bags out for Ms M, said our goodbyes, and left Trevor to complete the paperwork and enjoy his new play area.

*We weren’t sure of the kitten’s actual name, but decided Trevor seemed appropriate.