And the award for most delayed report goes to…

Anyways! Six of us head to Arkwright Meadows Community Gardens again for a slightly cooler evening of gardening.

This time we were tasked with clearing a big patch of nettles as well as clearing bindweed from a couple of the beds. As the quote from Nigel in the title suggests, this was a bit trickier than our normal "smash and dash" approach to weeding. Katie from the gardens explained to us that the bindweed roots go incredibly deep and incredibly far, but you need to get the whole thing to stop it coming back. There was a lot of digging around and delicately pulling the whole thing out to keep us busy for an hour.

Shoutout to Tom for hitting 99 good deeds!!!

We were back at Windmill Community Gardens again this week for another session.

The already expansive Gardens have grown again with the adoption of a new, wildly overgrown plot, and our host Lucy gave us a tour to start things off.

There were a few jobs to do in anticipation of their Art in the Garden event this weekend (pop along if you can!) so we quickly split up into a few groups to get as much as we could done in the time we had.

Peter started off clearing some rubbish left over from the shed removal, including a particularly foul-smelling bucket (kudos for your strong stomach, my friend!). Once that was up in the skip, he joined Leah, Nigel and brand-new GoodGymers Khiltee and Dina (Welcome!) in clearing weeds and overgrown foliage from the new children's area. Hazards included ants and other bugs and some particularly prickly bushes with very deep roots.

Rosemarie and Dayna had arguably the toughest task of lugging woodchip from the pile at the entrance right the way down to the bottom of the gardens to cover the pathways that had rotted down or become overgrown. Nigel and Khiltee also grabbed some buckets to cover the floor of the teepee and the old shed foundations.

We ended the session munching on some delicious, freshly-picked fruit!