On a beautiful, mild and sunny October Saturday morning, Charlotte, Kit, Alison and I met at Moorlands Gardens to help out with laying a new path. This was Kit & Alison’s first GoodGym Mission and they both got stuck as we worked together to cut back some of the overgrown borders, fill up the wheelbarrow with woodchip, and re-lay the path for the winter. We stopped counting the number of barrow-trips back and forth but there were a LOT. Having done more than we thought we’d be able to achieve in 90mins, we downed tools and skipped off to enjoy the afternoon Hoping Kit & Alison had a rewarding time and will be back for more GG goodness! 🍁🍂🪵

Moorlands Gardens had just had a large delivery of woodchip arrive so we arrived on the morning after the storm to help spread it on the walkways around the gardens. The weather was surprisingly ok and the gardens were in great shape considering how other parks in the area had been affected by storm Eunice!

When we arrived, we had a quick briefing from Grant before splitting into 2 main teams: Tilly and Tom on bramble-clearing and everyone else on woodchip wheelbarrowing.

The pile of woodchip didn't seem to be going down at all for the first 30-40 minutes but sure enough, after just over an hour it had all been spread! The bramble-clearers had a tough job as it was much more overgrown than we initially thought, though we managed to discover a whole section of wooden decking that clearly hadn't been used in a long time!

As we were packing up and leaving, it started raining as if the weather was holding out for us the whole time. What great timing and thanks everyone for braving the post-storm mission!

Thanks to Dawn for the pun, which had to be explained to me (face palm)

I managed to totally confuse timings and arrived promptly at Moorlands Community Garden at 10:30 when the task was listed for 10:00. Luckily when I arrived, Tracey was still there after struggling to find the location initially and had hung around in case anyone else turned up. After I'd apologised profusely to both Tracey and Sylvia (from Moorlands) for wasting half an hour of their Saturday mornings, we discussed what needed doing. We thought we were there to help chop back some trees but apparently the tree surgeons are going to do that. The other things needing doing were spreading woodchip and general tidying. We couldn't spread woodchip since the new woodchip hadn't arrived so we opted for a quick tidy. In about 45 minutes we managed to clear one of the paved walkways of some stubborn weeds and grass between the slabs with whatever tools we could find. Maybe next time we can help spread some woodchip and hopefully it'll be a bit warmer then too!

This was the second attempt of a community mission at Moorlands as it was rained off last Sunday. And we welcomed Kaz to his first Goodgym activity 🙌🙌 The garden has been a bit neglected the last few years so this was our first visit and we will probably come back for more. A big pile of mulch was outside on the car park and our job was to move it inside and spread over the paths. There were 2 wheelbarrows, a shovel, some forks and a rake so we divided the jobs between us and after an hour it was spread nicely over the paths. Rebecca and Nathan were heading to Southwark for another community mission but first we all went for a coffee in Brixton Market and discussed the cakes we will be baking for Tuesday's group run 🧁

We met the lovely Kathleen from Moorlands Community Garden who asked if we could shift some containers full of garden waste from the middle of the community garden to the composting areas at the back. Half way through moving the garden waste, we were tasked with a new job to cut back some huge bramble bushes which had taken over the back of the community garden. Splitting into two groups: the "bramblers" (tackling the bushes) and the amblers (walking the garden waste from one side to another), we cracked on. It's a tenuous link here but bear with me, the puns were hard for this one! An hour later and we'd emptied three or four big wheelie bins of garden waste into the composting areas and had totally removed the massive bramble bush!

Rake and Chips - like Cod and Chips, but maybe you fancy a more sustainable fish like Hake. Hake rhymes with Rake, so yes your right that is a good pun.

8 of us turned up last night to help Moorlands Gardens spread some woodchip. They had a massive pile of woodchip blocking a car park space so our job was to clear the space and spread it across the paths around their community allotments.

Effie, Tim, and The Lobster King got to work with the rakes spreading the chips evenly across the path while Will, Dawn, Dan, Clare and Tom did the actual hard work shoveling the woodchip into wheelbarrows and transporting around the allotments.

only 3 mores barrels to go

After an hour the new paths were looking fantastic and Katleen was very happy with the work we had done.