Afshin and Kash joined Janpal and Natalie from Southall Community Alliance and London National Park City Ranger Ash at Western Road Urban Garden at a special occasion: a community garden open day! The event was a part of Ealing Climate Week and aimed at introducing more local people to the garden. There was also a group of volunteers from Low Carbon Contracts Company, who swapped their laptops and the office in East London for gardening gloves, rakes and spades.

Afshin and Kash joined the team which was building on the outcome of the last Saturday's session. This time the exercise of leveling the ground, pegging down the Terram membrane and covering it with paving grids was to be repeated on a larger surface to create a new community space.

The volunteers managed to cover the most of the designated area with the membrane and grids. The scarcity of materials was the only thing that could stop them. Once more Terram rolls are ordered, GoodGym will be back to finish off the task!

A week ago, GoodGym Ealing celebrated winning the Team of the Year award from Southall Community Alliance, the organisation behind the Western Road Urban Garden. This Saturday morning was the perfect opportunity to live up to that title!

We arrived as a team of six, ready to take direction from Ash, who never disappoints when it comes to sharing a clear vision for what we want to achieve. The community day was also a chance to meet Natalie from SCA, who normally leads some of the mid-week sessions at the garden, and Harry, a new volunteer she recruited.

We also welcomed a new GoodGymer, Nadia, who chose Western Road as her first GoodGym experience. Great choice and fantastic work, Nadia!

Ash's vision today was to move the outer border of the veg patches further out to expand the growing space. The job included:

1. Clearing the nettles alongside the hedge along the fence
2. Removing the paving grids and the membrane underneath them
3. Tipping, raking and stomping on soil (donated by the police!) to raise the plot borders
4. Laying and pegging down a Terram membrane (apparently much more effective than the old one)
5. Laying the grids on top of the Terram

We managed to transform the border on two sides of the growing area and made a start on the third, which was a result worthy of the Team of the Year! By the way, Kash brought the trophy to Southall to present it to the wider team helping at WRUG, as this had been 100% a team achievement.

By the end of the session, Ash was pleased to list three outcomes that the dream team had completed:

1. Delineating the new border of the plots
   
2. Making the outer hedge more manageable
   
3. Expanding the food-growing space

It was a lovely day of teamwork and doing something good for the Southall community.

We're at Western Road again very soon – check out the sessions and come along: Community garden day - Tuesday morning and Tuesday afternoon!

This was not your typical GoodGym session in Ealing: Wednesday evening tasks are a rarity for us, and we usually venture to Southall in daylight on a weekend! But not this time!

The session was organised at short notice last Saturday to finish off the concreting job from last weekend. But then came the plot twist: after over 50 dry days, the rain finally came, although not much of it. Seeing the forecast, Ash, our task owner, was worried that the concrete wouldn’t dry and set properly, so he decided to finish the task himself earlier in the week.

Little did he know that eight GoodGymers - a number surpassing even last Saturday's attendance - were already planning to turn up for the Wednesday session! And little did we know that Ash had already beaten us to it.

For such a big group, Ash had a plan B: bringing a couple of other projects to fruition.

🌱 Task 1

Not far from the newly concreted area, next to the two 1,000-litre water containers, Scott, Freya, Afshin, Alana and Janet got to work clearing the area. They removed logs and weeds, levelled the ground and, finally, covered it with woodchip - which turned out to be Janet’s favourite activity!

Once covered with a membrane and grid, the cleared area will become a seating space where people from the local community can come together. It will also leave room for a greenhouse.

It was the first ever GoodGym task for Alana and Janet, who decided to try GoodGym together. Welcome, both - hopefully we’ll see you again soon!

⚡ Task 2

You could simply call it digging a trench, but we have a better name for it! Electrifying Western Road!

Steph Ducat, Richard and Kash picked up their mattocks and got to work digging a trench for a pipe that will carry electric cables from the solar panel to the shed, passing through the polytunnel. It was hard graft! The team managed to reach an acceptable depth (although not the ideal 40cm) just as it started getting dark.

There wasn’t enough time to line the trench with terram and cover it with sand, so we had to leave the newly opened chasm secured for another day. Before leaving, we secured the area with a rope after discovering that children would be visiting Western Road the following day. Safety first!

We didn’t get around to naming our new canyon. Any ideas? Put them in the comments!

What's next?

If you fancy another Southall session, there’s one coming up next Thursday, when we’ll be spreading the word about a beginners’ running programme and helping people in Southall get active. And if you’re curious to see what’s next for Western Road, join us next month for a Saturday morning session!

It's been over 50 consecutive days - and counting - without any rain in some parts of London, and Western Road Urban Garden in Southall required a constant effort from Janpal and volunteers to help the site keep up with the ongoing heat. The exotic vegetables inside the polytunnel were doing well, and the veg plot we had cleared, woodchipped and partially planted only a month ago started already producing crops such as aubergines and tomatoes! None of that came without a price. Manual watering of veg beds took a lot of time and energy and wouldn't be sustainable in the long term. That's something the architect of Western Road community garden Ash wanted to address for a while.

In February this year, we had taken first steps towards executing Ash's vision of installing two 1000-litre rainwater containers. The mud wasn't going to serve as a reliable base for a tonne of water in a single container, so after digging out the soil, we'd been looking forward to pouring the concrete into the square spaces for a few months. Today was the day to make Ash's vision reality!

Seven GoodGymers came to support Western Road on a Saturday morning in August:

• Walkers: Angela
• Runners: Sevan and Kash
• Cyclists: Scott, Amy and Steph
• Cyclists/parkrunners: Richard

The Plant Squad

Angela, Amy and Janpal had plenty of tasks to do: from weeding the bed alongside the polytunnel, to harvesting and watering the new veg plot. In the polytunnel, they discovered a watermelon that looked pretty good on the outside, but a closer look revealed a small hole and the fact that the fruit was half eaten inside! Judging by the size of the hole, it looked like a rat, rather than Mr Fox, was the prime suspect this time. To save the other juicy crops, Janpal ordered the harvesting of the green tomatoes before the rat laid its eyes on them. Amy found some very long chili peppers, and everyone had a chance to see ripe snake gourds.

Janpal's top tip for cooking a snake gourd:

"Make sure to take the skin off and discard the seeds. We haven't done it last time, and that was the most bitter thing I've ever had!"

The Concrete Cowboys

The group keen to learn concreting skills joined Ash and started with combining the mixture for a base for the water container:

• 4 parts shingle
• 2 parts coarse sand
• 1 part cement
• plasticiser.

While Steph, Richard and Sevan mixed the concrete in a tray to wheelbarrow it to the destination hole surrounded by a wooden frame, Scott, Kash and Ash cleared the weeds inside and around the frame, assisted with pouring the mix, then levelled and tamped the concrete.

The team used up all the resources allocated for one of the bases, then threw in some rubble to bulk up the base, but there wasn't enough material to finish off that stage of the project. Despite great teamwork and solid progress, we'll need to come back to finish off the job when more materials are available. Join us next Wednesday!

Another hot Saturday in Southall offered everyone a bit of relief from the heatwave, with a gentle breeze reaching Western Road Urban Garden.

Four GoodGymers and Janpal from Southall Community Alliance were the only participants at the community day until one of SCA's trustees and a member of the Southall community joined them.

Before getting to work, Janpal showed the GoodGymers the recent developments in the orchard and the polytunnel. The dwarf fruit trees, planted less than three years ago, were already bearing copious amounts of fruit. In the polytunnel, exotic plants like karela and snake gourd, and more familiar ones like aubergines, cucumbers, watermelon and bell peppers, had started producing crops as well - and we'd only watered them last month when the plants were still small. What an incredible growth!

Today's task was simple: remove weeds from three sections of a vegetable plot to free up space for more food to grow. Sevan, Amy, Freya and Kash tackled thistles, nettles and bathua, which Janpal described as a staple green in North Indian cuisine. The plant, although healthy and tasty, had completely taken over the veg plot, so it had to be removed. Luckily, it was easy to pull out. We cleared the whole patch with ease, leaving only two rogue tomato plants that had introduced themselves from the neighbouring plot.

After a break to grab some water, fruit and samosas that Janpal had brought for us, we continued by clearing the plot closest to the fence - removing not just weeds! The amount of broken glass we keep finding in the soil never ceases to amaze us, even though we've dug that area several times and many of us know Western Road's past as a derelict allotment and a fly-tipping hotspot.

Time flew by. We chatted not only about football, but also about Southall Community Alliance, which recently celebrated its 25th anniversary. Janpal has been with the organisation almost from the beginning and told us the story behind the charity, its focus on bringing community groups together in Southall, and tackling important local issues such as inequality, poverty, mental health and social isolation.

We entered the woodchipping phase and covered all the soil and the remaining broken glass we hadn't been able to remove. We're sure we'll find it again at the next opportunity to dig that section!

The highlight of the session was tasting the delicious apricots from the orchard. Janpal had covered the little tree with a net to save some of the fruit for the volunteers. The method had proved a successful defence against the fox, who loves to steal the fruit before it gets ripe.

"He won't be getting his one of five a day now," said Janpal.

Thanks to that, we could get a little closer to our fruit and veg quota, munching on sweet, juicy apricots straight from the tree. You won't get that kind of taste from the supermarket!

If you want to help out at the urban garden and find out what will be ready to harvest in August, join us for the session next month. Sign up here!

On this very summery Saturday, nine GoodGymers joined Janpal and Ash at Western Road Urban Garden in Southall for a community day. As usual, our favourite Southall task owners left the most exciting, most technical and most physical tasks for our brilliant team!

The main task of the day was to pick up where we had left off during our previous sessions at the polytunnel and finish transforming the area around it.

Before we started, we got to see what had been happening on the path we created a couple of months ago on the less visible side of the polytunnel. Ash proudly showed us a new beehive that had been installed there and told us he had already tasted honey produced by the Western Road Urban Garden bees, harvested not long ago.

Janpal also gave us his famous tour of the urban garden, showcasing the many ways it supports the local community, from the vegetable plots and raised beds used by community groups and schools to the exotic produce grown in the polytunnel, which is supplied to local food banks, where fresh fruit and vegetables are often among the hardest items to source through donations.

The tour was especially valuable as we welcomed not one, not two, but three new joiners: Keise, Barnaby and Mandeep. With gardening backgrounds ranging from years of farming and flower-growing to complete gardening beginners, they all quickly got stuck in. Alongside regulars Sevan and Steph Ducat, and the legendary walking duo Danny and Kat - who had already covered 10 kilometres before the task even began - the team got to work. Together, seven GoodGymers tackled the main task, battling through hard, dry soil to remove weeds and the old membrane before laying a layer of terram (stellar work on that, Kat, Mandeep and Keise!) and finally covering the area with woodchip, laid at speed by Sevan, Barnaby, Danny and Steph.

This left Freya and Kash to take on a very different task: digging and moving dried mud. However strange that combination of words may sound, it was needed to reinforce the base for a new water tank. As Janpal and Ash explained, they have been struggling with water pressure at the urban garden, and watering the many plants during such hot weather has become a demanding task that Janpal has had to undertake every other day. To help solve this issue, we had previously assisted with digging the hole for the foundation for new large water tanks that would be installed.

Freya and Kash spent most of the session filling the sides of the frame with soil and securing the area by pegging a membrane around the edges. Along the way, they had great fun putting a landscaping tamp into action and discovering that it's slightly larger and heavier than the ones used to make an espresso.

To get ahead of the water tanks' installation, Barney and Keise took on the satisfying task of smashing bricks and other construction debris unearthed during previous sessions into smaller pieces. Far from simply letting off steam, they were creating ballast for the concrete base that will support the new tanks. At Western Road Urban Garden, nothing goes to waste!

As always, the GoodGym team was treated to the generosity of Southall Community Alliance and enjoyed plenty of fresh fruit, along with some amazing samosas freshly baked by a local shop that Janpal had brought along.

Before leaving Western Road Urban Garden, we completed one final task: emptying a small water tank by abundantly watering the plants in the polytunnel. We then helped Ash fix the filling mechanism and secured the tank with wedges to level it properly. What a fulfilling Saturday morning it was!

We're now getting close to the final stage of installing the new water tanks, which will involve a bit of concreting and hands-on engineering - no prior experience required! The project will make a huge difference, helping Janpal and Southall Community Alliance tackle ongoing water pressure issues and reducing the need for time-consuming manual watering during the summer. To help the polytunnel produce survive and thrive through the hot months ahead, we'll be scheduling this task soon, so watch this space.