GoodGym Oxford and the Mystery of the Missing Task Owner :-)

What do you do when you turn up to a task to find the garden all locked up? Luckily for us the hubbub of 19 GoodGymers chattering attracted some curiosity from the Barracks Lane Community Garden's neighbour, who also happens to be someone we've helped out with gardening at Flo's cafe in Florence Park. Fortunately she was able to let us in, and then came back a little later to open up the tool shed, which only left us to figure out what needed doing around the garden!

After the recent drought and heat wave it was fairly obvious that watering would be on the agenda, plus chopping back any plants completely burnt and frazzled by the unusual heat. We decided to mostly leave alone the taller sculptural-looking plants as they could look quite attractive through autumn and winter even though they've finished flowering. Stepping a bit further into the garden we found that there was plenty of weeding to be done, particularly between the cracks in the paving, and there were sneaky brambles along the edges of the garden which definitely needed lopping. The lower garden has plum, pear and apple trees, so we picked up the fruit that was dropping and sorted it into edible or compostable, and then Annie (our rescuer) requested we trim the hedge back a little at the entrance. At that point our task owner arrived and confirmed that we had guessed the task list pretty accurately, just asking us to also break down some rotten fence panels to make them easier to get out of the garden. Always happy to use sharp tools and brute force, a combination of axe-wielding and good old-fashioned muscle got that task completed in no time.

Knowing that we needed to be out of the garden by 7:30pm we filled our pockets and tummies with plums and scarpered out onto Barracks Lane bang on time.

Congratulations and big kudos to Bethan for reaching a whopping 250 Good Deeds!

Welcome to GoodGym Abi - lovely to meet you!

Sorry for the access issues everyone!