With Deansgate having transformed since the Great Manchester Run yesterday, Derek (first session with the GoodGym t-shirt 👏), Peter, and Ben met up to run the 4-5 km along the Bridgewater Canal towards Old Trafford and Gorse Hill.

After meeting Katie at Gorse Hill Studios with the key, we headed down to the community allotment to tackle any weeds and look after some of the beds.

While Peter and Katie had a handle on what was planted where and helped maintain or thin out some of the beds, including the boom of carrots 🥕 and beans 🫘, Derek and Ben took short shrift to the weeds 🌱

Lots of horse tail, grasses, bindweed, and sticky weed removed, freeing up some of the fruit trees 🌳 and clearing the paths and entry ways in the allotment. The potatoes 🥔 are growing well, with lots of lettuce, salad, and more beans growing, with tomatoes 🍅 and chilli 🌶 growing inside the polytunnel.

It's always amazing how much gets done, and how time flies, when working on the plot, with a final watering giving the finishing touch to a productive session.

We'll be back intermittently throughout the summer so watch this space 💪

Welcome to Derek for you first GoodGym session!

With a warm and sunny bank holiday weekend, the parks were packed, which also meant that the bins were overflowing with litter from takeaways and picnics. To counter the problem, Derek, Scott, Victor, and Ben met up in St Peter's Square to make the ~2 km jog towards the green spaces in Ardwick to remove as much as the litter as possible.

We started on the Greek Street green space near the ring road overpass, with litter accumulating near the traffic lights and from the main road after being discarded by passing drivers, and collected a few wheel trims and lots of cans and bottles. We continued up Lamport Close to drop off some full refuse sacks (just 3 here), before carrying on towards Kincardine Road and Gartside Gardens.

It seemed to be a hotspot for laughing gas use, with balloons and empty cannisters (13 or 14 in total) found in the car park of the Salvation Army building to add to their growing box of empty cannisters near their refuse point. More were to be found on the outskirts of the park, likely dumped by nearby parked cars.

Within Gartside Gardens, clearly a party had taken place with a pile of half open black bin bags near the entrance, while a lot of litter was splayed around the park, a lot having been blown from already full bins or from people placing it near to a bin, expecting it to magically stay close by to be collected... In this case we collected another 8 laughing gas cannisters and 9 full refuse sacks, leaving the park in a much tidier state than it was before.

12 sacks, over 20 laughing gas cannisters, and all of it picnic, takeaway, or packaging related. We got a lot of thanks from some of children in the park and from some passing drivers as we were litter picking. Gentle jog too despite the heat.