Last night 8 brave souls looked out of their window, saw the hail stones and the tropical thunderstorm and thought "I'm a GoodGymer, this is what I was born to do!" At 6:45 it wasn't looking promising with only Super Sam, Effie and yours truly at Papa's but by 7pm the rest of the crew had turned up and were raring to go. ⚡☔

The conditions were truly bizarre, one second blue skies and rays of sunshine immediately followed by cracks of lightning and heavy rain, then a bit of wind moved the clouds on and the cycle repeated but as I said we don't care - we had a task to help out on and Stephen, Bill, Lydia and their team of volunteers were waiting for us at Loughborough Park. ✊

Before setting off we had a quick warm up and the category of the week was favourite breed of dog, Gayle wins for most interesting breed with the Shibu Inu (although we all know Michael had it right when he said Boxer)! 🐶

It's a short run over to LP but this week Effie had kindly offered to come down and be walk leader for us (remember this is an option folks so do reach out and ask if you want to walk to a session - great for those recovering from injury!) so we were there in no time despite the rain.

In just a week so much work had been done by the Urban Canopy guys but still plenty was left to do so we put on our gloves, picked up the hand tools and got cracking pulling and digging up the last of the weeds in the central section of the gravel garden. Charlotte volunteered to grab the secateurs and head of into the undergrowth and start chopping that back as well. 45 mins later we were all suitably knee deep in mud (sorry Saucony) Lucy had been covered head to toe but we had a great time as Sam's speaker kept us entertained with cheesy classic songs! 🎧

So that's it for us and this task after two weeks and an incredible amount of work from GG and FLP volunteers. Chatting to Stephen it looks like we will be back in June for some planting and then again in October for a year end round of planting - personally I can't wait to see the evolution and what it all looks like.

Check out the pics (nice one Effie) and catch you next week!