Marston Community Garden is a lovely community-run allotment on the Court Farm allotments site. People from the local area can adopt a raised bed of their own or help with gardening tasks. It's a lovely away to get involved with gardening even if people can't commit to a whole allotment of their own.

GoodGym were called in for an evening blitz on the weeds which had sprung up lately, and with the warm dry weather we've had over the last few days the vegetable beds all needed a thorough dousing with water too.

With a bumper turn out of GoodGymers it was time to make sure everyone knew each other a little bit, and to hear everyone's GoodGym intro stories. There was quite a range of origins, from seeing us advertised at the bus stop to coming across us on social media or being introduced by a friend. A shout out for Jessy's 10th Good Deed brought the introductions to a close (sadly no Garland of Joy can be issued in COVID times), although in reality Jessy is at well over 50 Good Deeds with all the prescription deliveries she has been doing during lockdown.

Introductions made, both to each other and to the background of Marston Community Garden (thank you Mark), we set off to the allotment site, wending our way through past the other allotments. The Marston Community Garden is a cheery corner of the Court Farm Allotments, with bright painted shed and thriving vegetable and wildflower plots. As ever we divided up into smaller teams to tackle different jobs - weeding the potato troughs (try saying 'potato tomato' five times quickly), harvesting runner beans to leave on the sharing table, filling the water butt and thoroughly watering all the vegetable beds, detangling bind weed and brambles from around the edges of the beds and paths, but making sure we left the teasels, even though they're prickly (read all about teasels here and their historical use here).

After all that hard work, a break for a slice of homemade lemon drizzle cake which Bethan had brought was very welcome. Then we packed up the tools, cleared the weed piles to the compost heap and gathered together to run.

Yes! A Group Run!

With Bethan signed off to run again only the day before, and couch to 5k app at the ready, it felt only right that we all joined in as a group run - can't leave a running buddy to do their first post-baby run on their own! Moral support is the GoodGym way. Michael Johnson's dulcet tones coached us through it, with plenty of pep-talking and encouragement. It was great to run-walk, or walk-walk, our way around the playing fields together. Really lovely to have Aoife back with us too, and walking strongly despite a ruptured achilles tendon earlier in the spring.

Welcome back to all for whom it was a first GoodGym group task since lockdown, and lovely to have Georgia along for her first GoodGym session!

So much to celebrate this evening!

Makespace is an affordable working and making space offering subsidised rents for social enterprises, charities and workers co-operatives. They have a lovely site on the canal in North Jericho.

During lockdown Makespace has, of course, been closed, and in that time the outdoor spaces have accumulated a lot of weeds and got quite overgrown - it sounded like the ideal job for the GoodGym elves!

On Wednesday evening 10 GoodGymers converged from all directions, gardening gloves at the ready, to tackle the jungle. We weeded, and scraped, and mowed the grass (until the lawnmower decided it was all too much like hard work and it needed a rest). We cleared litter from the car-park, gave a rose bush some breathing space, chopped back brambles, moved a HUGE bag of manure over to fill a raised bed, raked up leaves, and generally got a bit sweaty and muddy, but amazingly no nettle stings this week. (Is it even a GoodGym summer task if there are no nettle stings involved?) An little over an hour later we surveyed our progress with a fair amount of pride - it was looking a good deal smarter than when we started.

Then off we all trotted, fanning out to different areas of Oxford, with the hope that the time for group running will soon be upon us.

A warm welcome to Conor and Kate who did their first GoodGym good deed with us last night.