Many tasks simply require us to move dirt from one place to another. That was the case this week when we were asked to fill some raised beds at the Community Gardens. After a run down from The Hive under ominously grey clouds we were greeted by Bob and Clancy who showed us the barrows, the shovels and the pile of soil that needed to be moved. "It should take you at least 40 minutes to fill one of these". After 20 minutes the first one was full so we filled a second one! It was great exercise for Kirsty and Marcus with plenty of strength and conditioning work. Meanwhile the skys cleared and we enjoyed a lovely sunny evening down at Pitchcroft. The beds will soon be planted up with colourful flowers that are then used to make bouquets. We can't wait to see how the garden grows!

It was a nice (and very familar for parkrunners) run round Pitchcroft racecourse to get to the Community Garden on Tuesday. We were there to build a flood garden but arrived to find another volunteer group had beaten us to it. The job was already done! Luckily the Community Garden is never short of jobs for people so we were quickly assigned some new tasks to keep us busy. It helps that Alison is a regular volunteer at the gardens so knew her way around and showed us the ropes, or in this case the chips! In front of us was a large pile of wood chips that was cluttering up the entrance to the wildlife garden and needed to be bagged up. Soon we had a fleet of wheelbarrows queued up and Kirsty, Fiona and Liam armed with shovels and ready to fill them up with the chips. Meanwhile Alison and Marcus were set to task cleaning up a bench in the wildlife garden and a kitchen sink unit that will be used...well we never found out what it was for! After 30 minutes of shovelling and scrubbing the whole place looked neat and tidy again with the chips in the bag and everything swept. We finished our lap of the racecourse to get back to The Hive and had definitely worked up an appetite for some chips of the potato variety!