It was the final task of a series trying to clear all the invasive Himalayan Balsam plants from the Lewsey Brook, one of the tributaries of the River Lea. Teaming up with Jen from TCV and some of Luton's regular conservation volunteers.

It was also the first task for Niamh joining us after seeing the session on Facebook and Petros returning for his second session.

With the continued drought conditions the brook was bone dry so we were able to climb in without getting wet and hunt for the balsam plants. They got pulled up, roots snapped off and left to dry out on the brook side. This section of the brook was thankfully quite light on the balsam so we got it all done in a couple of hours and was able to collect lots of litter as well and take a walk back upstream to double-check the areas we'd done in previous weeks.

This session completed the length of the brook, a whole kilometer! We'll see what pops up next year but we've prevented loads of new seeds from being laid so hopefully there will substantially less to do next year!

It was Gill's turn to lead our small group run tonight, and after a quick warm up we headed off along New Bedford Road to Cowslip Meadow. The mention if Golden Rid by Dave had lead some if us into a false sense if security, as our usual Golden Rod patch is not too far out of town. So finding out that we would be running twice as far was a bit of a surprise. But the temperature had cooked and it was a lively evening to be running. On arrival at the What Three Words location we couldn't soot any if the dreaded weed and had just about resigned ourself to a fruitless mission when the combination of Ella's eagle eyes and Gill's first encounter with Google Lens reassured us that we had found our target. The ground was either relatively soft, or our pulling power was in max strength as pulling out this invasive pest was relatively simple and we had several piles to take back to the gates. The run back was even more enjoyable, with the slope now in our favour, and the sun dipping down further, and it was good to know we'd got just over 7km under our belts too.

We had a good team out this morning to support the Friends of People's Park with their monthly litter pick, and it was lovely to welcome Petros Teklayi for his first ever GoodGym task. He teamed up with Lee and they were soon headed off into the trees to locate rubbish and recycling. Gill managed to grab the most interesting find of the day - a rather salubrious sports car , and although it was missing two wheels Lucie took a shine to it, and decided this was her new car! She and Dani headed off across the meadow, and Gill and Anthony went through the orchard and up and over towards Pope's meadow. Rachel joined with the Friends to keep things clean near the park area. We left the park looking neat and tidy and ready to welcome weekend visitors. Well done team. We hope that Petros has enjoyed his first foray into GoodGym and that he'll join us in many more missions.

A solid team of six set out to clean up Leagrave Park, a mix of Goodgym and the local Friends of the park. The park wasn't in such a bad state really, just a light sprinkling of cans, bottles and wrappers from recent park users. We zipped around the entire park pretty quickly and managed to find a couple of litter build-ups in spots we must have missed before. The park was spotless by the time we were done! Ten bags collected and no strange or unusual dumped items for a change!

2 goodgymers David and Neill finished clearing the meadow of an invasive plant at Riverside. A hard job, well done!!!!

This week's group run was a return to the very long task of removing invasive goldenrod plants from the riverside meadow.

A few years ago when we started tackling this task the plant covered the whole meadow and was shoulder high all over. The big thick clumps took all our might to pull out.

After several seasons of pulling by us and other volunteer groups the meadow is showing massively improved biodiversity and the goldenrod that remains was just knee high little seedlings and shoots from fragments of root left behind last year. The pulling was also much easier as they didn't have as firm a grip of the ground.

With six of us picking our way between plants and pulling up piles of plants we made a huge impact toward finally getting this patch cleared. Plus we got it all done before it went to seed! We'll see what returns next year but it won't be much and we'll be back to finish it off once and for all.