A beautiful summers evening (finally) for this weeks Group Run to Agnes Riley Gardens. Our task this week was to clean up a pond of weed and litter and make a staircase for baby frogs to get out of the ponds. We headed off just after 7 for a uphill slog to the south circular 🥵

Upon arriving we were greeted and promptly split into two groups - heavy work or delicate work. Heavy work entailed digging out two submerged pots from the pond, removing pots when they were light enough, taking soil to the compost area, collecting stones and finally building a stone staircase for the frogs to leave the pond. Joao, Inny, Katy, Lindy, Nathan and Shauna took this job.

Delicate work involved fishing, raking, scooping weeds out of the big pond, searching through them for tadpoles and throwing the tadpoles back in the water.

Once we were done we headed back to Brixton, this time a little bit cooler and a nice bit of downhill!

Three seasoned GoodGymmers cleared some planters of soil on a beautifully warm and sunny Tuesday evening. As soon as we arrived we got stuck straight in. The Friends of Agnes Riley Gardens needed us to help remove soil from planters from the polytunnel area to some big bags so that the planters can be moved. There were about 4 or 5 planters of soil to be moved but since they were having more volunteers in the coming days, they just needed us to make a good start. All three of us cleared the first planter within about 20-25 minutes so we were feeling pretty confident and pledged to do three by the time we left.

We then realised we'd been a bit ambitious when we started to get a bit tired in the arms, backs and legs. We also ran into some difficulty clearing planter #2 as it had lots of polystyrene blocks in it to help with drainage. This made it much more tricky to shovel soil from. We ended up filling about three large buckets worth of polystyrene from the second planter.

We stopped after we'd been there just over an hour and had succeeded in our goal of tackling three planters! 💪

The folk at Agnes Riley Gardens had made two planters and set them up in one corner of their lovely community garden only to discover that it was too shady to let anything grow. So they asked GoodGym Lambeth for some help and help we did

Arriving at dusk, we quickly emptied the soil out of one of the planters into buckets and barrows, and then gracefully(ish) carried the empty planters all the way across to their new sunny spots. And then filled them all up again.

It was all over so quickly, Adrian couldn't really believe it but that's the power of GoodGym.

8 of us met up at Agnes Riley Gardens on a frosty Sunday morning to lend a hand in maintaining the community-run allotment.

We were tasked with de-weeding and flattening the vegetable plots, ready for planting. There were a few fennels left still surviving the winter chill, so we made sure to re-plant those somewhere else instead of uprooting and mixing with the weeds.

Within an hour, we had cleared almost all of the weeds from the plot and raked it over smoothly - a dramatic difference from when we started!

Well done everyone :)

35 excellent runners gathered at Papa's Park for our group run tonight.

We said a huge Lambeth welcome to 6 brilliant new runners - Anna, Jessie, Emma, Isla, Kate and Harriet

Next, we heard about these exciting events coming up in Lambeth and our neighbouring areas:

• A community mission at Herne Hill Halloween party at 7pm on Thursday 31st October.
• A parkrun takeover at Burgess Park with GG Southwark at 8:30am on Saturday 2nd November.
• The monthly kebab chase meeting at 10am on Sunday 3rd November at BaBa Boom Battersea.
• A big GoodGym London social from 6:30pm on Friday 9th November.

Lots of lovely things to get involved with :)

It was also SPOTM week and this week's very well-deserved winner of a unique assortment of National Trust pens, Puregym freebies, a bookmark and possibly the world's smallest notebook was Shauna. Despite only joining GoodGym recently, Shauna is already on her 15th good deed and her 9th for October. Huge kudos and thank you!

And onto the main event aka tonight's task.

We split into two groups to run there, David and Charlotte leading a slightly longer run whilst George and Nicky led a more relaxed party pace troop.

On arrival, we surprised Karen with the size of our group but quickly split into teams, digging up stones around the veg plot, moving planks of wood and clearing the area around the Bug Hotel. After half an hour, Karen seemed very happy with what we'd done and we headed back to base to enjoy some delicious cake expertly baked by Becca and Angela

Great work everyone, thank you so much and hopefully see you at next week's group run for more getting fit and doing good.

45 GG runners turned up tonight for a couple of mega gardening tasks.

At the start, we welcomed new runners Phoebe and Matt and congratulated Carol for reaching 50 good deeds, Elise for reaching 200 and Frances for reaching 250.

ABSOLUTELY SMASHING

Steve also awarded Tom Benson his own personalised bottle of beer for his utterly incredible organisation of the GoodGym Olympics!!

A team of 5 walkers (mostly whacked from some incredible racing at the Bath Two Tunnels) headed off whilst Tom gave the rest of us a good warm up.

We then split in two: 💥Most of us ran 2k to Brixton Windmill to do a load of weeding in the play area. 💥A smaller group took a 3k route to Agnes Riley Gardens to help fill up some planters.

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Brixton Windmill is London's last working Windmill don'tcha know! And it provides flour for Brixton Prison's bakery as well as The Old Post Office bakery in near Papa's Park (do check it out!). They provide regular tours of the Windmill to locals and are in the process of building a visitor centre to host school groups and more community events (they already host the Bread and Beer Festival in May 👅)

Our job this time was on the outside of the Windmill, pulling and scraping all the weeds out from around the play area equipment. We promptly got to work with 7 large hoe/scraper devices, a few small forks and a whole load of gardening gloves.

There were big weeds, small weeds, shallow weeds and far too many stubborn weeds. Commitment to the cause was strong however with some relentless deep root excavation. We filled up a MASSIVE bag of weeds and even brushed away the debris.

Bang tidy.

We then headed back down the hill (with obligatory stops for press ups, jump lunges and squats) and took on our Home Stretch Strava segment (well done Dharmesh - 12 seconds!).

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Here's the lowdown from Tom and the Agnes Riley Gang:

So a merry band of 15 of us took up the mission and headed to Agnes Riley Gardens to meet Adrian. The mission as far as we were aware involved planters, nothing more. So off we jogged lead up by George we all made it there safe and sound. Adrian greeted us with a plethora of tools, including forks, spades, hoes, wheelbarrow…..spades, it was a right box of tricks, Christmas had come early for team Lambeth. So the main operation was to move some planters onto a new patch of soil. However before we moved the planters we had to level the soil, as the patch was on a slope. So banded with our lovely tool set we got down to shovelling soil from the high point, loading up barrows taking it 5 meters to the low point empty it, and giving it a rake. We repeated this motion more times than I could count but the end effect was we had a level playing pitch it was quite a sight!

Whilst this was going on a band of three Lambeth members got going on tidying up the surrounding allotments, making them weed free - the place looked cracking.

Once the ground was level, it was operation move the planters into place. Now these bad boys looked quite heavy however thankfully they came apart in two sections, the legs and the body. This made life loads easier, and before we knew it we all 4 of them in place. Adrian was happy we all patted ourselves on the back for a job well done and then ran back to HQ.

Nice work Lambeth - also while I’m here just want to say a massive thanks for my present last night, loved it and will save it for a special occasion, its currently chilling as I type. Really made my day, you are a wonderful bunch and thanks for so many of you coming along and getting involved, it was mega. Nice one team.

Tom

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And off to the pub we went, for many beers & the bake-off draw!

Cheers GG Lambeth! 🍻