On a surprisingly sunny Sunday morning, seven GoodGymmers met up to perform some gardening tasks for Antrim allotments.

Over the last few years the Antrim Allotment Association has taken more responsibility for looking after Antrim allotments following council funding cuts. This means helping to look after plots of people who might not be able to do all the heavy work themselves and also taking care of community areas. If the areas are not maintained, plot holders who are less physically able are likely to lose their plot, which would reduce their opportunities to be physically active.

We were met at Antrim allotments by members of the Antrim Allotment association, who had identified a large variety of small jobs for us to work on.

As part of a follow on from some previous community missions, several of us worked on digging out a large amount of clay forming a banking at a boundary of the allotments. It was incredibly sticky stuff, requiring two people per shovel: one person to dig out the clay and hold the shovel above a rubbish bag, and another person to scrape the clay off the shovel and into the bag! As another task, we moved bricks (baked clay is definitely the classiest type of clay), debris (including part of a terracotta pipe) and bags of compost around and occasionally off a plot holder’s plot. The most difficult part of this job was trying to make the wheel barrow go in a straight line when the ground clearly didn’t want it to. Space is clearly not flat when you have a large mass you want to move through it. For another plot holder, we pulled weeds and trimmed ivy to help with a general tidy up of the area.

Chat generally flowed as we worked, including a surprisingly long discussion about whether or not venues that take a photo of your ID when you enter are classier than those that don’t (and what that says about those of us that do frequent such venues). About an hour or so in, we also had a cake break to enjoy some decent homemade vegan chocolate cake and have a general chitchat as a group 😋

Jobs done for the day, we headed off to a local pub just so we could grab some of its famous mac and cheese and a soft drink or two, and also so that Abi could educate us with Google on details of our name Saints. Our favourite facts of the day were that Saint Abigail is also known as Gobnait, and that Saint Clair is the patron saint of eye disease and laundry. These facts are begging to be written on someone’s CV. We managed to make our final goodbyes and leave the pub just 10 minutes or so before the hail, lightning and thunder started. Hopefully this isn’t in response to our Googling of Saint names but, just in case, perhaps we won’t be doing this at the next one… 😅