Another Wednesday, another evening of GoodGymers loitering in an East Oxford car park awaiting their food parcel pot luck. East, South and West; we have most of the city covered with our man and woman power.

This week we had 24 regular parcels to drop off around the city and one emergency parcel to deliver to ensure a family didn't go hungry tonight.

People often assume Oxford is a wealthy city, but there's a lot of poverty, not helped by the high cost of living and the pandemic. Each week our parcel numbers are rising and there's more and more demand for help putting food on the table.

The large number of deliveries GoodGym gets through on Wednesday evenings makes a big difference to the number of people who can be helped. We appreciate your energy and your time commitment, as well as your store cupboard and Christmas gift donations, and yes, for answering the last minute call for carrier bags!

3 of our lovely team reached the 10 Good Deeds milestone tonight: well done Anna, Sarah, and Zoe. We're very happy to have you involved.

Thank you for the yummy cakes Sarah. Hope you enjoy celebrating Thanksgiving tomorrow!

Welcome Rosa and Claire - great to meet you both!

The weekend long apple picking taking place at St Frideswide Farm turned into a Saturday, day-long pick with volunteers from the community garden and many others picking over 900 kg of apples, meaning there was not much left for the keen and eager Goodgymers on Sunday morning. However, at the 11th hour, we were asked instead to help out at the Marston Community Gardening allotment just off Boults Lane in Old Marston.

As a warm-up (although with the September sun baking down, we were quite warm anyway), we were asked to clear an area of debris for a community chicken coup that will be housing nearly 30 rescued chickens in the non-to-distant future. The community garden has also been given several unused and neglected raised beds to give to young families or locals who may not be ready to commit to a full allotment plot. So after we cleared the coup area, we all got to work removing weeds, brambles, pesky dock leaf roots (Aoife can tell you all about that) and other debris so that they look welcoming to any keen local gardening enthusiasts. They all looked ship-shape by the end and we even managed to harvest a few loose potatoes to take home. Thanks to Rob for coming along who has recently moved from Bath for his first Goodgym Oxford outing, even with countless bike problems on the way to the task.

Despite the sometimes back-breaking work, everyone was pleased with the effort and the opportunity to get out and do good. Indeed, the motto at Marston Community Gardening of "It's All Good" seemed apt on a productive and sunny Sunday morning.

Could it be that the GoodGym x Children's Allotment is destined to forever be a rainy evening?! It seems likely, but it doesn't dampen our enthusiasm for this amazing community cooperative project.

Since the Allotment is a bit tucked away we met in Florence Park; gathering up a few lost souls, chatting about ideas for autumn/winter tasks, and giving our latest Black Tshirt club member a cheer before setting off to the Children's Allotment - well done on 50 GoodGym Good Deeds Sarah!

Alice was ready and waiting for us at the Children's Allotment, and extremely well-prepared for our bumper crop of GoodGymers, with several tasks planned, and tools ready and waiting. This week we had hedge maintenance, woodchip spreading (cue an enthusiastic dash to the wheelbarrows!), tomato picking, and bramble/weed clearing for a new fruit and veg bed.

Tasks assigned, tools and gloves sorted, and everyone got stuck in straight away. The most popular task was definitely barrowing loads of woodchip over to spread out in what will one day be a play area, with much whooping and shouts of encouragement in that area! The teams untangling bind weed from the hedge, clearing the area for new planting, and harvesting tomatoes might have been quieter, but they were no less effective and chatty as they worked away.

As ever, it's impressive how much can be achieved in little more than an hour when 20 or so people get to work, and this task was no exception. The whole wood chip pile was redistributed over the play area, almost the whole hedge was cleared of it's choking bind weed, and the vast majority of the brambles and weeds were lopped and dug out from the new planting area.

We have been well fed on our Community Missions lately, and this week's bounty was eating and cooking apples, plus some delicious plum tomatoes. Yummy!

Welcome to our hat-trick of new volunteers; Natalie, Venetia, and Anna, as well as Nicki who joined us all the way from Cardiff. Great to meet you!

Our run of dry Wednesday evenings had to end sometime, and tonight was the night. Soggy was definitely the word, but a little rain doesn't deter the determined GoodGymer (although we'd be grateful if the weather doesn't take that as permission to rain on us too often!).

Meeting at Florence Park (sad to report no chalk dinosaurs survived the recent downpours), armed with gardening gloves and waterproofs, we set off in convoy to the Children's Allotment.

Every time we go to the Children's Allotment there is noticeable progress on the site. They had lots of exciting plans for the spring, which COVID lockdown entirely derailed, so now it's all-hands-on-deck to try to make up for lost time. We had three main tasks tonight: weeding, skipping, and picking.

To give a sense of the scale of the task they've undertaken with the site they've now nearly filled their 7th HUGE skip with rubbish, rubble and brambles. All that work has opened up a lovely site, with vegetable growing areas and an orchard of apple and damson trees.

Team skip pitch-forked rubbish into skip no.7 then gathered up rubble and re-homed that in the skip too.
Team weed got the muddiest I've ever seen people get at a GoodGym task as they cleared the weeds from around an apple tree, and the breakaway group weeded a new bed to make it ready for vegetable planting (with a little bit of nasturtium nibbling as they worked).
Team pick picked apples and damsons and sifted through the windfalls for edible fruit. It turns out this task was even worse than litter-picking for forcing people to contort into uncomfortable positions to grab that one more that is JUST out of reach!

As the rain intensified and everyone reached the end of their alloted tasks we filled our boots (or backpacks) with eating apples and scooted out promising to return in 2 weeks.

We had a new red Tshirt on show tonight, as Kate's has arrived. We're now placing bets on whether Sarah or Bethan's black Tshirt arrives first.

We always love having new GoodGymers along, and this week we extended a warm (if soggy) welcome to Rebecca and Mariam. Lovely to meet you both!

Bethan rashly promised to make apple cake from her apple haul, so there may be apple cake at next week's task at Hogacre Common. Fingers crossed!