Our winter food bank clean got going last night; a very welcome indoor task given the sudden chill!

Each winter we do a session roughly once a month to give the food bank a thorough clean. It's hard for their usual team of volunteers to take time away from packing food parcels to do a really thorough clean, so GoodGym taking over the task helps them focus on getting food out to people in need.

This month we cleaned fridges, emptied food waste, cleaned the wall behind the food waste crates, swept & mopped in the kitchen. In the main hall we moved the shelving along the wall closet to the car park, swept, mopped, cleaned the shelves.

This evening we were back at the Rose Hill Community Centre to tackle the garden space for the Rose Hill Junior Youth Group.

Armed with tools, fortified with Meg's lovely flapjacks and lit by a combination of football pitch floodlights, head torches and rechargeable potable lights, we managed to get a lot done.

More roots were cleared and scrubby plants removed. I really hope that we managed to protect the bulbs planted by the nursery earlier in the week!

Chat ranged from holiday planning, winter recipies, food and book recommendations.

Good work team!!

Today we donned our headtorches and high-viz and beat the curfew by delivering flyers for our friends at Flos.

The flyers were mostly for their wonderful refill shop - encouraging people in the local area to shop local, support a local business and reduce their single use plastics.

Meg brought an excellent flyering tool in the form of a trusty spatula and showed us a "fold and shove" process that protects fingertips and knuckles from letterboxes! Something to remember for our next flyering task!

Last night we were called in to help clear a patch of ground outside Rose Hill Community Centre. There's a plan in place to turn it into a functional garden space with raised beds for the Rose Hill Junior Youth Club, but it's currently overrun with cotoneaster. Armed with secateurs, pruning saws, and forks we chopped, sawed and dug until the light failed, then switched on the portable lights and headtorches to finish up.

We haven't completely cleared the ground, but we've made a good start!

Thank you for keeping us fueled with biscuits and melon Meg.

This evening we returned to the Warneford Hospital site to do some more work on their anniversary garden installation.

More compost was poured into the huge metal planters, more gambions were filled with stones and pinecones (pretty sure we could all have a crack at dry stone walling now!) and we were able to congratulate Anwen, Fred and Andy on their cracking performances at the Oxford Half Marathon!

Working quickly to race the sunset and dying light (said in my best Michael Sheen voice) we achieved a brilliant amount. Can't wait to see the finished result!

A few of us then went for a run, where I inflicted an intervals session on the group, SORRY!!!!

Until next week......... xoxo