This was no April Shower as 16 sunny souls ran 3 km to Redcliffe to help Growing Support at their Spring Open Event with Redcliffe Gardening Club

IT'S OFFICIAL!! - GoodGym Bristol loves Saturday mornings and Saturday mornings love us back!!

It was fabulous to see a splattering of red at Ashton Court first thing today, turning up to find Hannah, Anthony, Dom and Bisa all getting ready to start their day by heading up the hill at parkrun and great to run across from there with Dom to join the GoodGym Saturday gang at Roll For The Soul for another fun filled jaunt to do some good in the local community.

It was a short run today, an ideal starter session, and we warmly welcomed newcomers, Robert and Martha (who had run once before with GG Camden), to the group for the start of our run to Somerset Square in Redcliffe, where we were met by Amy, from Growing Support, an award winning social enterprise tackling loneliness, social isolation and inactivity. running weekly gardening clubs, where older people are enabled to work together in the garden, grow their own food and connect with nature.

They were hosting the Redcliffe Gardening Group's Open Event and it was great to see the local community getting involved and enjoying the fabulous surroundings.

Amy passed us over to Kia and Marky, who ran through the tasks that we would be carrying out and in true GoodGym fashion our team organised themselves into four groups of four and got stuck into their respective tasks:

Paul B, Alice, Yiyin and Yuting headed off with a wheelbarrow to move stone chippings from one part of the estate over to the garden.

Paul R, Charlene, Julia and Nicole got busy with spades and forks moving and turning over compost in a tight area that required a great deal of synchronisation.

Deb, Maddy, Dom and Ellie were busy digging at the top end of the garden preparing the ground and then planting blackcurrant, whitecurrant and raspberry bushes.

David, Martha, Robert and myself were down at the bottom end of the garden digging and turning over the soil which Kia could then sieve to remove some of the embedded stone.

In amongst all the digging there was quite a lot of bricks being found, apparently from the old Georgian properties that had originally been there before the area had been turned into flats - there were also stories of dead bodies but thankfully we didn't find any!

This was a really nice morning and lovely to spend some time with people living in the neighbourhood who had visited the garden to relax, walk their dog or just to see what was going on. There was a real feeling of togetherness.

After our work was done, we enjoyed tea, coffee, juice, cakes and biscuits before a quick Heavy Metal Red Thunder photo shoot!

We were then heading back on our short journey for a stretch out and lunch at Roll For The Soul, where we congratulated Paul B on reaching his 200th GoodGym deed - a fantastic achievement by an absolute GoodGym legend and all round ace bloke! Thanks also for backmarking today Paul.

Well done to Maddy, who got of the mark with her first and today's pun!

And to Julia, who headed straight off after then run to help Surfers Against Sewage with a litter pick, which is actually what we will be doing next Saturday morning!

Thanks to everyone for coming today, it was great to see you all and a great job all round!

There are two more runs this week on Tuesday evening and Saturday and our monthly social with food and drink (and a few milestones to celebrate) after the run on Tuesday, so check all those out and hope to see you at some or all of those.

Cheers

Dave