Many hands made light work at Grow for Life's Walled Garden when 6 Bath Goodgymmers arrived to help tackle various jobs in this wonderful walled garden used for therapeutic horticulture sessions. The hedge line was cleared of weeds ready for trimming, compost was turned, a mountain of woodchip was tamed and there were many trips to the dead hedge across the lane in the orchard with all of the debris created! Thanks to all and congratulations to Daniel on your first official Goodgym task too!

Bath GoodGym trio Cosmo, Ruth and Tanya returned to Grow for Life's walled garden where they helped the regular Saturday volunteer group tackle an overgrown area. it was a battle against bindweed, brambles and burdock with the odd surprise find of an old rake, long lost loppers and even a selection of wellies amongst the undergrowth! Great progress was made in clearing the area which is destined to become an additional space to be used in therapeutic sessions. Join us next time in this lovely place to help Grow for Life continue to transform lives through gardening.

Three GoodGymmers joined Grow for Life to spruce up their tool shed with a lovely lick of black paint. We always enjoy coming to their wonderful walled garden where they provide social and therapeutic gardening sessions for those living with low confidence, anxiety, depression or isolation. With lots of fun chat including the origins of phrases such as 'cutting the mustard' we can confirm that Bennath, Ruth and Tanya definitely cut the mustard today! With the repainted shed looking very smart we were well rewarded by our hosts with cool melon and iced drinks which were so welcome on a hot day. Great job all and looking forward to the next session in August, sign up to really make a difference to this small Bath charity.

We were so happy to return to the glorious Grow for Life walled garden at Newton St Loe today where we all got stuck in to the task of giving the toilet shed a much needed coat of paint; it was great fun with lots of positive chat in a beautiful place. Join us next time as we've been invited back to paint the tool shed too! Big thanks to Meyrick for fab photos 😊

When these run reports are late appearing it's almost always because I'm suffering from pun paralysis! That is to say we're supposed to add a pithy headline, preferably involving a clever pun of some sort. Or at the very least add a headline of any kind at all.

And some days they just won't pop in to your head. GoodGym writers' block is a real thing, you know!

Embarrassingly, this time I went to an AI chatbot for help. "Give me an apple themed pun", I lamely asked of it.

"What do you call an apple that's been bitten? A half baked idea" it came up with. Half-baked indeed!

I pointed out that this was a joke, not a pun, and learning from its mistake the chatbot did indeed offer a (terrible) pun this time.

Encouraged by this I asked "give me a few puns to pick from" and, noticing my accidental punnage in this, added "do you see what I did there?"

Chatbot did indeed pick (sorry!) up on this and offered a few lame picking-related puns this time. But the work was done by now. My own creative juices (sorry!) were once more flowing. This was my story. My scoop. Chatbots have their place, they're out of the box now and they won't be going back ... but we must use them wisely - not as creators to do the creative work for us, but as a sounding board to help spark our own imaginations.

Back to the task. Grow For Life have an orchard next to the Walled Garden we all know and love. Being an orchard of course, it's rather low maintenance. So I never even knew it was there.

But today they've invited their fans and friends - and there were indeed dozens of people in attendance - to come along and help in picking some of the apples, and also joining in the full end-to-end process of washing and sorting, mashing, and pressing juice.

A proper old-fashioned community of real humans getting together to help each other do something good and get something dome. Chatbots will never be able to do that (he writes...)

A pressing task indeed...

The summer season at the walled garden is well and truly over now, and even though this was a beautifully warm summery morning our task was very much an autumnal kind of tidy up.

Basically weeding. Clearing up an overgrown grassy area, and pulling up lots of brambles.

All in all a lovely revitalising session at the beautiful space. Come visit some time 😀