What do you do when your Community Garden is one side of the railway line, your delivery of woodchip is the other side of the railway line, and the only route between the two is a pedestrian bridge?
Call in GoodGym muscle of course!

Having tackled the Steps of Doom a few weeks ago helping Hogacre Wild Wallow, and being expert shovellers these days, we were confident we were up to the task. Of course, we had reckoned without the mini heatwave making every small movement a sweaty endeavour, let alone climbing up and down hundreds of steps hauling trugs of woodchip. No wheelbarrow accessible ramps here! However, we are not a team to admit defeat on such flimsy grounds, so we set to work...

It turns out that woodchip which has sat in a large heap for a few weeks creates the perfect conditions for mushrooms and a significant amount of it's own heat due to microbial action. So much so that it is not unheard of for piles to burst into flames (don't worry - it's rare!). We definitely felt that heat as we shovelled and hauled up and over to Hogacre Common (do they really need to build railway bridges so high?!). No morels or portobello mushrooms were spotted in the destruction and reconstruction of the woodchip pile; disappointing but not sure there'd have been mushroom for them amongst the other OxGrow crops anyway.

Numerous trips to and fro, spotting new graffiti masterpieces each time, efficient workers that we are we actually finished ahead of schedule. Our hard work was mulch appreciated by OxGrow and so we were rewarded with some spoils from the garden - chard, mustard leaves, chives, radishes, a couple of stalks of asparagus.

To keep you in step on our next wood chip task, try this tongue twister used by Anna and Vicky to distract from the many many stairs:

How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
He would chuck, he would, as much as he could,
and chuck as much as a woodchuck would if a woodchuck could chuck wood.

"In 1988, state wildlife conservation officer Richard Thomas of New York attempted to figure out just how much a wood a woodchuck could chuck, if a woodchuck was capable of doing so and had the inclination. Woodchucks don't actually chuck (throw) wood, of course, but, since they are a burrowing rodent, they do know well how to toss around some dirt. So Thomas took to calculating a typical size of a woodchuck burrow, which consists of three rooms and a tunnel leading to it that is roughly six inches wide and extends 25 to 30 feet. He determined that 35 square feet of soil needed to be excavated to create such a burrow. Knowing that a cubic foot of soil weighs 20 pounds, he calculated that a woodchuck can chuck 700 pounds of dirt a day. Should a woodchuck be so inclined, Thomas concluded, he could chuck about 700 pounds of wood."
More fun facts about the origin of the tongue twister here.

Well done Rachael for completing your 50th GoodGym Good Deed!

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Thanks to Anna, Vicky and Matty for the puns!