No heatwave stops us, we were out in full force yesterday after a last minute change had us painting and gardening at the Viables Community centre.

It was a great session with the main job being to revitalise a lot of planters, scrapping the paint off and giving it a fresh lick. They turned out looking amazing and some wonderful before and afters!

Samantha & Kelly (t her first session did an exceptional job weeding the gardens around the area managing to fill a who bag with weeds before composting it.

Sammi and Peter also did a greta job litter picking where the highlight was finding a rats skull which was graciously donated to Charli who loved and left it.

With 6 of us meeting at the Basingstoke Sports and Social Club Evelyn &Tazmin walked to Viables while none of Sammi, Yeun or Peter were willing to let the others down so we jogged over.

Wow! I'm blown away by how much can be achieved in just over an hour! Led by Charlotte and Suzi from the Dwelling place we cleared so much of the garden space preparing it for the next step in its transformation.

This meant cutting down and removing a trees and bushes, completely clearing a tonne of ivy, moving all the rocks and pavement slabs and creating a giant pile of cleared out garden waste.

I'm incredibly proud of the team for how much effort they put in and how much we achieved and also thankful to the Dwelling Place for how welcoming they were.

For this session we met as usual at the Basingstoke Sports & Social Club before we split into 2 groups with Sammi, Yazid jogging and Tazmin, Yeun & Evelyn walked to the Dwelling place where Charli & Samantha met us.

With the YMCA Basingstoke having to cancel our session with them we quickly changed to doing some litter picking instead.

It was a beautiful evening and was quite fun getting back to our roots of litter picking. Eastrop Park was as always pretty tidy, but we found if we went a bit off the path there was still plenty of litter to be collected.

It was lovely having Guy join for their first session and Yeun at their second sesison.

In the end we filled 3 bags of litter and left the space looking much nicer! As always we had a fun time chatting as we went

Last nights session was a fun and hard working session in the play area of Eastrop Park. Our primary focus being the clearing the main play area of tanbark and weeds. As you can see from a before photo this are was absolutely covered making it a lot less appealing and more likely for kids to get hurt.

Alongside this Samantha went back to our GoodGym roots and litter picked the whole space while Evelyn did an amazing job clearing the seating area of weeds.

As always we met at the Basingstoke Sports & Social Club at 6:15 before 5 of us walked to Eastrop Park with Yazid meeting us on the way.

When we arrived we met Sandra from Basingstoke & Deane Council who greeted us with all brand spanking new gardening equipment and more importantly fruit/water.

Congratulations to Madeline who got accepted for her new job!

Well done to Sammi for spotting the heron first and carrying two very heavy bin bags with me and Charli cheering her on.

Its always nice doing a Walk Together session, especially when the weather is good and going past some gorgeous areas! Just check out some of those pictures!

Was amazing having 8 people at the session with Yazid at their first session and getting to welcome Lindsay & Sammi back for their first sessions in a while.

When walking through Crabtree Plantation Charli, Yazid and myself may have got a little distracted by the playground, where we all managed to get ourselves tangled up.

Make sure to check out the other Rambler Run sessions in the area here https://www.bvaction.org.uk/wellbeingwalks

Due to an unfortunate family emergency we were not able to assist at the Helping Dogs & Cats Charity shop.

However we were able to do a last minute litter pick! We managed to avoid the rain for the 30 minutes and found some really good spots of to clear. We managed to make a three course meal throughout the session, with plenty of fruit, chips & peanut butter for dessert.

Was a lot of fun watching Aaron running around in his shirt and shorts. Was also lovely to meet Charli & Samantha at their first sessions.

Thank you to Sammi, Tazmin & Evelyn for attending more sessions even with the late change.

In all we filled 3 big bags of rubbish and made a definite impact in tidying Basingstoke