Our GoodGym May morning extravaganza finished with a task in the garden of Flo's The Place in the Park - a local community hub and delightful cafe. Thomas was awarded the Garland of Joy to wear throughout the session in celebration of reaching 10 Good Deeds. Well done Thomas!

We had weeding to do and a pirate ship to paint (as you do), and 13 bleary-eyed, sleep-deprived GoodGymers to do it. Holly and Katie got the yarn-bombing task of cordoning off the pirate ship while the varnish dried with brightly coloured knitting wool. Hazard tape is so 2021. The rest of us divided up between weeding and pruning the garden, or sanding and varnishing the pirate ship. A break for complimentary coffee and pastries kept us with enough energy to get through til 11am despite the early start for May morning celebrations, and we're pretty sure we didn't weed anything that shouldn't be weeded.

A successful 1st task of May!

After a rainy start to the morning, the sun came out as we walked through the gate of Flo's - a good omen indeed! We started off with some weeding and raking up the autumn leaves to clear some space for new plants, with small breaks to move a large pile of sticks and a children's slide(!) Then, after a delicious coffee from the cafe (thank you Flo's!) we planted bulbs and small flowers. We put violas along the front of the cafe, and pansies by the entrance gate, with daffodils underneath, ready to emerge in the Spring.

It was sadly too wet to paint the small kitchen set for children- maybe a job for next time!

A quartet of GoodGym gardeners joined the Flo's gardening team to get some work done in the outside space ahead of the cafe restarting outdoor dining next week.

We dismantled a dried out willow fence, moved picnic benches into place, put together parasol bases, set up a freecycle station, flattened and recycled a pile of cardboard, planted lavender, chopped back (but failed to dig up - as testified by the bent fork prong) a bush in the flower bed, and started the process of weaving new willow fronds to create a new flowerbed fence.

We now consider ourselves East Oxford's premier willow weaving experts.

Sadly, we failed to avoid snow and hail, but since we also had plenty of sunshine we'll call it a draw.

Hot drinks on-the-house were a delightful perk - thank you for a lovely couple of hours Flo's!

Anwen and I spent a very lovely hour laying turf for the Naturescape project in Florence Park. Naturescape is a new project, which is transforming the old mini golf course into a interactive nature space for the whole community - www.naturescapeoxford.co.uk.

We managed to lay a whole pallet of wild-flower rich turf and then had celebratory falafel from The Syrian Sisters afterwards.

Volunteers worked in pairs from the same household/bubble. Alex's bubble took the hour before us, and Sarah's went along later in the day.

They float through the park with the greatest of ease
The Goodgym crew off to do many good deeds
Their movements were graceful, Makena they pleased
Then rewarded by watching the flying trapeze

Sing along!

Flo's The Place in the Park have been given permission to take over the old Bowls pavilion next to their main building for a 6 month trial period, so tonight it was all hands on deck to get it renovated and ready for community use. With only 6 months to prove they can make good use of it there is no time or budget to waste to get it spruced up!

Tooling up with masking tape, sand paper, screw drivers, paint rollers, brushes and sponges, the Goodgym team set to work. Bethan and Laura took on the kitchen space, sanding smooth the polyfiller (getting dusty bums in the process), then moving on to painting the walls. Meanwhile, the remaining quartet headed to the changing room to dismantle old shelving, masking tape the edges of the benches and mirror (mind the spiders!), and then set to painting the walls.

Newly discovered fitness session: Unscrewing shelves from the wall with a manual screw-driver in a warm room is surprisingly sweat inducing!

45 minutes later and a little paint-speckled, we had taken down 2 shelves, sanded one wall, masking taped the edges of 2 rooms, painted 5 walls, dodged many spiders, and cleaned up our rollers to finish.

After a quick stop to admire the trapeze lessons next door, we set off back to base, pausing for partner sit-ups and planks in a shady corner of the park.

This task definitely needs more visits to get the pavilion ready to use, so keep your eyes on the website for updates.

On such a summery evening it felt all wrong to meet inside, so we took our rendez-vous point outside the East Oxford Community Centre and soaked up some early summer sunshine. Chatter about upcoming running plans brought us to talking about Love Trails Festival in Wales in July (looks really fun!) and the Two Tunnels Races and Summer Party which one or two of us Oxford Goodgymers are already signed up for.

Welcoming Guilia, Linden, Sophie, and Talitha to their first Goodgym run (give them a cheer!), we set off on the 1 mile run to Flo's - The Place in the Park through the back streets of Cowley.

Flo's is a great community hub in East Oxford with loads going on even though it is a relatively new addition to the area. For most of us this was our first visit to Flo's - The place in the Park, so our task owner Makena explained a bit about the place; the building was taken over by the community after the Oxford children's centres were closed in 2016, and it opened as a community hub in October 2018. It now houses a nursery, the community midwives, and a cafe, and will shortly be hosting a Refill Shop too.

Flo's is surrounded by metal railings, and our task for the evening was to make these look a bit friendlier and prettier by weaving strands of willow through them.

Checking out some examples of other willow fences in the garden spaces and collecting up our pre-soaked willow branches we channeled our inner artists and got to work. This is the kind of task that would take 1 person a really long time to do, but with 13 motivated Goodgymers you can achieve a surprising amount of willow-weaving in 40 minutes or so! Not wishing to completely block the view into Flo's charming garden space, we decided that 2 lines of willow weaving were the best way to prettify the metal railings. Persuading the tougher willow branches through the railings was a surprisingly good arm workout, and I'd like to think that tiptoeing past wildflowers, fennel, and asparagus spears helped us improve our agility. We may not have achieved something as impressive as this, but give us a couple of weeks to practice and maybe we'll get there!

Incidentally, our previous visit to Flo's has been featured as one of the example photos on the Oxford Green Week photo competition website - we are the example for Health and Happiness.

Once we'd used up all the willow we said our goodbyes, and with all of the lovely Florence Park to play in it would have been criminal not to use the area for our fitness session. Everyone paired up with a certain trepidation for a game of meet & retreat: dashing in opposite directions around our chosen patch of grass, high 5-ing when you meet your partner coming the other way, and then racing back to the starting point. Who can get back to the base first?! This definitely brought out everyone's competitive instinct! As a recovery break it was straight into 30 seconds of partner-planking. Then repeat. Twice.

Good things come in 3s you know...

As most impressive planker Tim was awarded the Garland of Joy to wear on the run back to base, rocking the florals all the way down the Iffley Road (Roger Bannister would be proud).

Same time next week?