A chill but dry Wednesday evening in November saw 6 GoodGym-ers meet at Charlton House for a gardening task at Charlton United Reformed Church.

After a quick warm up & a biscuit-related ice breaker we were a-wafer a run to the Church garden to meet our host for the task.

This involved lots of weeding as the beds, grass and gravel pathways had become fairly overgrown; helpfully we were well-prepared with trowels, forks etc so made good progress, leaving the area tidier & ready for winter. We had great advice from the team at the garden who assured we were clearing weeds only and none of the pre-planted flowers in the beds.

Great work team - until next week for making short(bread) work of the next task! (no more biscuit puns I promise....)

Anyone a fan of Catchphrase? It's been a favourite in our house, especially watching back all the celebrity ones so we stand a chance of beating the contestants. Stay with me, this is relevant to the task, I promise. This week's episode we watched back included a catchphrase called "How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?" Now personally I think that's a bad catchphrase, maybe partly I didn't get it. Also, who actually knows what a woodchuck is? It looks suspiciously like a Beaver....

(interlude while I google: is a woodchuck a beaver?) Turns out, as we should all know, woodchucks are members of the Sciuridae family while beavers are members of the Castoridae family. Soooo let's call them distant cousins and move on.

Anyway, the relevance of the Woodchuck debacle is that whole of our task yesterday I had the tongue twister going round in my head as I hopelessly hammered at those damn nails to get them out of the pallets. Thankfully, Julian and Marta were far more efficient with lots of hammering and crowbarring, breaking down the entirety of two big pallets and managing to save all the wood so that the church can repurpose them into some planters for the garden. Meanwhile Sarah used one of those incredibly satisfying Hari Hari knives to dig up tonnes of (potentially) wild garlic for replanting. Excellent job everyone.

It was lovely to be somewhere new and hopefully we'll be back later this spring!

To save you some time, here's the end of the tongue twister: "He would chuck, he would, as much as he could, and chuck as much wood as a woodchuck would if a woodchuck could chuck wood."

I bet a beaver would chuck wood better than a woodchuck would ;)

Oh, and this task was my hundredth, a milestone which marks the honour I feel to have spent so many hours in the company of wonderful people!

Great work team, until next time.

As Saturday got slightly less cold Louise, Lynne and Julian made their way to the United Reform Church in Charlton for today's mission. The church has been holding community sessions with doctors and there was a need to improve vehicular access by clearing the lane at the back of the church.

We were met by vicar Andrew and Lucy and soon put to work: Lynne got down to work clearing brambles and weeds and Julian and Louise set to digging a path for cars. Normally when working on missions we'll see cats, dogs, the squirrels and the occasion fox, so it was delightful when a different creature, in this case a small frog, was uncovered.

After an hour and a bit the lane was a lot clearer and the mud and weeds had been tucked away for collection. Extra kudos to Louise though, who stayed even longer to help Andrew lay some sleepers and gravel to finish off the path.