Tonight, six GoodGymmers turned up to help Global Generation clear out Skip Garden.

Global Generation is an educational charity that takes short-term leases on areas of land that are waiting for building work to start, and converts them into green/growing spaces that are usable by the local community. This year, they've been moving operations from one of their old sites (Skip Garden, located at the rear of Granary Square) to one of their new sites (Story Garden, located at the rear of the British Library). As they approach the end of their wind-down operations at Skip Garden, they asked for some volunteering help.

GoodGym were happy to help 😎💪🏻

On arrival, we were a little surprised to see the Skip Garden site shrouded in darkness. Fortunately for us, we hadn't turned up to the wrong place! 😄👍🏻 Unfortunately for Skip Garden, an accident with the wiring earlier in the day had caused a power cut across the entire site.

With limited options for what we could do (health and safety hat says no!), we settled on a pleasant enough job of moving some soil into builder's bags and liberating some plants from the ground for later transfer to Story Garden.

So, here's a breakdown of what we got up to:

• Katrin seemed mostly focused on digging and moving soil (at least whenever she was within my eyeline: she probably did a lot more outside of my eyeline)

• Sally and Helen worked on freeing an absolutely massive (& aromatic!) curry plant

• Becky and I worked on freeing some plant that, for reasons known only to my subconscious, will always be known as a "crowning bush" 🤷🏼‍♀️ (why, brain?!)

• Finally, John was a ghost in the machine, working almost entirely out of my sight (I think he likes it that way).

Because of the lack of electricity, we finished up after an hour or so of work, all of us feeling like we'd gained an extra hour somewhere or other (twice in a month! #winning!), and went off to enjoy the rest of the evening in a different manner.