Tracey shuffled along to Alvaston Park to meet the pack; Adam from Derby BMX club, Mark the king of track design, and Andy, a professional carpenter, and additionally jack of all trades, willing to turn his hand to anything.

This was the first day of a two-week project to resurface the track in preparation for the National BMX Championships. With spades in hand, we straightened the track edges, removing grass and plants that were using all sorts of tricks to invade the track.

If anyone wants to join in on a future session, I can heartily recommend it. Even just an hour will make a difference to the team - everyone's friendly, chatty and cheerful. A diamond of a session.

Ashley, Lewis and Rachel met with our friendly task owners down at the River Gardens steps to help scrub away at some of the moss that had collected along the steps.

Sunshine was scheduled and the group enjoyed a catchup by the river, with Ash and Lewis planning a run together on another night, hopefully avoiding rain again.

The task owners for this volunteering location are always really appreciative of what is achieved in a short space of time and said what a difference we had made to the steps. The group also had some really positive comments from passers by at what a good job was being done.

This task is a really good transformation task to see what can be done to improve an area in a short space of time when working together in a group. Keep an eye out for future dates when GoodGym Derby will return to River Gardens.

Ashley and Mandy met the regular volunteer group to do some pruning and tidying up of the trees. A new term was learned, "Crown Lifting" whereby the low handing branches are removed to raise the crowns base. It's a fancy way of saying we hacked at everything we could reach and stuffed it in a bag. Much fun was had while we worked, talking about running, training, falling off cliffs etc.

Mandy, Grant, Lewis and Pete returned for another session at St Matthew’s church. The mission was to bring a little TLC to the Garden of Rest. We cleaned the commemorative slates around the boarder - these being local people who had passed away in the 1800’s. We also cleaned the more recent stones in the central area. We also checked on the boarders we had created on a previous mission - the local schoolchildren have started to plant flowers and bushes, and the area is starting to come a live. Great to catch up on a lovely evening, and as ever thanks to David for the tea and biscuits.

Along with Reg and Nat from Trees for Derby, a group of volunteers from GoodGym Derby made a big impact on a Tiny Forest on Saturday.

The sun was shining and the group welcomed Helen from Severn Trent for her first GoodGym session! It was fantastic to have Helen there as she had been at the planting for the Tiny Forest site so it was great to have her knowledge of the site and to provide a bit more background to it. Like the fact each Tiny Forest has been named after a Commonwealth country or nation, with the one we visited being named after the national bird of the Maldives, the white-breasted waterhen. Severn Trent created the Tiny Forests to give communities more access to green space and to leave a lasting environmental legacy of the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games. Find out more about the Tiny Forest the group helped here.

Mandy, Ashley, Grant and Rachel planned to clear the area of weeds, loosen some of the identification tags around trees and do some litter picking to tidy up the spot. On arrival, Reg requested the group helped to trim back some of the plants and focus on clearing weeds....which there were a lot of! In a joint effort, a huge dent was made in a short space of time to clear the site and get it to a stage where the trees that had been planted could flourish. Gardening gloves and leg coverings were welcomed as there were lots of thistles to pull out. Ashley had the find of the morning when he located one of the Tiny Forest tiles and looked underneath to see the insect groups that had made it their home.

We'll be back at the Tiny Forest again to help with regular maintenance and are hoping to join up with Trees for Derby again for a combined effort. Thank you to everyone for attending and helping make a big difference to this small green space in our community. The weekend held some exciting plans for the group as Helen was going to be welcoming a rescue dog into her home and Grant was going on a 100 mile bike ride on Sunday.

Tracey and Gwyn met Alex from The Derbyshire Cricket Foundation and the happy cricketers and families at this heartwarming event. After an early discussion, there was a throwing game (involving us in a lot of running to get the balls back), then catching practice (I was the worst catcher) and batting and bowling. It was so good to see an improvement in everyone's skills even in this brief time. We all got together for tea and biscuits and a chat afterwards. Thank you everyone for a lovely morning.