On a sunny Sunday morning, eight GoodGymers found themselves in a quiet neighborhood behind Kennington station, ready for a grueling gardening session. 🌱

We welcomed newbies: Ed as well as Suzanna, who came along with Rachel. 👋

Alex, the task owner, had brought over the tools and wheelbarrows to move the piles of woodchip set all out in the park. There were five massive piles of woodchip that needed to cover the edge of the park in the hope of covering the weeds would kill them and bring moisture to the terrible soil. 🌳

We split into teams of two: Ed and Sarah took on the first pile, Rachel and Suzanna had another, Claire and Alex took on the third and finally, Lici, Rebecca and Sam worked on the fourth pile. The fifth one was being looked after by local volunteers who came out to help. 💪

Helped with some Sunday morning tunes, the team smashed it by completely shifting and mulching three out of the five piles of woodchip in an hour and a half! 😳 it's no easy feat!

The session ended with a group photo and Alex took everyone to collect some ripen fruit. 🍎🍐🍓

Sweat was broken at the beautiful ThorLands Garden this afternoon as we took to finding the root of the bindweed and clearing the space for local residents to enjoy.

Phil put some real muscle into up rooting the mother to hopefully prevent the overgrowth of the bindweed from returning.

Litter was cleared, trees were enclosed into a fenced off area to keep foxes at bay and plants were potted by Lucie who went the extra mile to make sure she completed her task.

A beautiful afternoon enjoying taking care the garden together while keeping fit and healthy in the sunshine! Great work everyone ✨🌞🌱

Despite the early signs of rain, three GoodGymers: Claire, Sam and Tilly mustered the energy to come out and help out at Thorlands.

With Spring meaning a mixture of rain and sunshine, lots and lots of things were growing all over the place.

Simon gave us the choice of two tasks, but since Tilly had been promised to plant Hazel trees a few weeks ago, we opted for this.

Yet, there was some digging out bindweed roots and turning over the soil that needed to be done first. We wanted to ensure the bindweed would not grow again and thus, we opted to spend the majority of the session ploughing the soil with the mattock and the new Dutch hoe (no, there wasn't an extra volunteer...it was a new tool).

Finally, we spent the last few minutes putting down the cardboard before dragging across a small tonne bag of top soil to put on top. Unfortunately, we could not get to the task of planting the Hazel trees, but this will be done on Wednesday during the group run - until then!

Claire, Lucy and Sam met Steph and all the other GROAD volunteers at St. Faith's to set up the room for the Open House for the refugees on Monday. This is where families come and choose whatever items they want and need. We brought in the clothes hanger to display various coats, jeans and summer dresses (maybe a bit too early) and put the rest of the items to display on tables. The biggest table was the kids toys as there has been a lot of toys that have been donated over these past few weeks.

There were also a few donations from the public that streamed in constantly over the hour, however, these weren't sorted out as the process was before. They were put to the back on the patio to be sorted on a later date.

We managed to set the room up within 30 minutes and this was helped with the number of volunteers.

Thank you Claire and Lucy for showing up and helping out!