I went to conquer the two hills of the Hilly Fields parkrun as part of my parkrun tourism plan. I was hoping to meet Steve, another GoodGymer, but the Run Director told me he couldn’t make it. After finishing the run, I carried out my usual barcode scanning volunteer task.

14 of us gathered at Glass Mill ready to plant the bulbs at Florence Green. Paul kindly lead the warm up and brought the group up to Florence Green whilst I tried to walk as fast as I could so not to delay getting stuck into the bulb planting.

Subo had organised the bulbs by tree and we were each assigned a pack of bulbs to plant with a variety of tools. Some more effective than others... A variety of bulbs were planted including daffodils and aliums.

We then moved onto our next task for the evening which was removing the stakes from the hedges that we planted a long while back, only if we thought they were strong enough to survive on their own without support!

We were soon done and dusted with that task as well and it was time to head back to Glass Mill.

Welcome Joshua to your first GoodGym session - hope you had a wonderful evening and we'll see you again soon!

We might be visiting Florence Green again before the year is out as they're expecting another delivery of bulbs from the council.

Next week we are heading to The Albany to tackle a list of jobs in the garden and of course the usual litter pick of the perimeter.

Another visit to Crofton Park Railway Garden and another shed to move! We had practice of moving the first shed not long ago and now it was time to move the second shed.

A shed moving team formed and created a human chain to move all the items from inside the shed to the new shed location. It was then time to move the shed, which I didn't actually see but I did see the shed in its new position!

Other tasks that we tackled were clearing the leaves from the garden, moving the compost from one compost pile to the other and sweeping the woodchip.

Ticking everything off our list, it was soon time to head back to Glass Mill. Hopefully we'll be invited back to put up the new shed!

A last minute change of tasks meant that we were heading to Heston Nature Reserve instead of The Albany so that meant those meeting us at the task had a challenge finding it but we all made it to the garden in the end.

It's only our second visit to this task and as always there was a long list of tasks to help with and get stuck into. The main task for the evening was to dig up the weeds in the grass area. The main question was which exactly is a weed as the team didn't want to be pulling up the wrong plant! Armed with 1000's of good deeds between them, the executive decision was made to focus on the alkinet.

There was also pruning, removing ivy, digging up wild leeks and mulching.

We almost had to leave Paul behind when we couldn't work out how to turn the hose off and he was just being given more and more buckets to fill. We'd never leave a GoodGymer behind!

We'll hopefully be back in the coming weeks to finish a couple more tasks before our busy schedule of Christmas related tasks fills up.

Next week we are off to Crofton Park Railway Garden!

Jacqueline and I after getting our legs moving at the local parkrun, (our first task) we headed straight to join this month’s community gardening day at St Mary the Virgin Parish Church. We met the lovely Sue who gave us our green-thumbed marching orders. Plenty of friendly regulars from the church were already digging in—literally—with one shared mission: help out and have fun doing it. Our tasks? A delightful mix of bulb planting, and the very satisfying mission of removing great hulking chunks of unwanted alkanet. Post-dig, we were treated to some divine homemade cakes and refreshments. Say no to that? Perish the thought. As a bonus, it was also one of St Mary’s Heritage Open Days (courtesy of the National Trust), so the church was open to all. We popped in for a well-earned wander and discovered the church’s fascinating history—because even gardeners like a bit of culture after cake. 😁