Jen and Brenda met Bob and the BBOWT amd Friends of Haymill volunteers on a rainy morning.

The only job today was to work our way along the outside of the perimeter fence, cutting back the hedge that was encroaching on, and taking over in places, the public pavement.

Brambles and Ivy were kept in check with loppers whilst the rake and brush were put to good use to clear up the cuttings so we could move them back in the undergrowth by the fence.

Today Samuel and Agnija continued with their hard work at helping turn over allotment plots for Raggy Rd Allotments. Their help is very much appreciated by task owner Anita.

Great to see the difference the team are making. Today's efforts helped out a lady who'd had a hip replacement and therefore was unable to do the digging herself.

We look forward to going along this coming Monday evening to do more work here.

This was our first task helping the Ramgarhia Gudwara on Woodland Ave.

Agni has sourced this task for us as she already helps out in the Gudwara.

On Sunday the Slough Gudwaras (Singh Sabha and Ramgarhia) are conducting the annual Nagar Kirtan march for Vaisakhi from one Gudwara to the other.

As it ends at The Ramgarhia Gudwara they had asked for our help in weeding and litter picking the beds. The grounds generally looked great but there was some TLC needed to the flower beds.

In the hour we were there we did manage to fill 3 bags of weeds and rubbish but there is more work to be done here so we agreed with the President of the committee to slot in another session on Monday evening.

We hope we've made a positive impact to the grounds.

Tonight we celebrated Earth Day with a digging task. It was a continuation of what we started last week at St Mary's Farnham Royal Primary School in their learning garden.

Last week we dug up bed 2 and removed as many weeds as we could. This evening we carried on ensuring the bed was weed free and did a little bit more around the strawberry and garlic sections.

We met directly at the task and our task owner Chrissy made sure we were given all the access we needed.

Great to have Firmo and Jason join us on their first task tonight. And Anna on her second task. Hope you enjoyed it and will come back again soon.

It's your bEARTH DAY!

So what exactly is Earth Day?

Earth Day is an annual event on April 22 to demonstrate support for environmental protection. First held on April 22, 1970, it now includes a wide range of events coordinated globally by EARTHDAY.ORG (formerly Earth Day Network) including 1 billion people in more than 193 countries. The official theme for 2024 is "Planet vs. Plastics." 2025 will be the 55th anniversary of Earth Day. It includes a wide range of events and activities arranged by Earthday.org. Check out their website for more info - Earth Day: The Official Site | EARTHDAY.ORG

Planets vs Plastics

The theme this year for Eath Day is Planet vs Plastics

Did you know?

• Global plastics has reached an estimated 460 million metric tons in recent years;

• It is estimated that 75 to 199 million tons of plastic are currently in our oceans;

• One million plastic bottles are purchased every minute worldwide, while up to five trillion plastic bags are used a year;

Earthday.org have a goal to reduce plastics by 60% by 2040 (60X40).

At GoodGym we are very active in litter picks and keeping our outdoor spaces clean and clear, we get involved in helping community groups with restoring their nature areas back to useable spaces as well as supporting conservation groups with their projects....but can we do more?

Check out this toolkit for some ideas -

EarthDay-2024-Toolkit-March-12th-Update.pdf

So after all this information on Earth Day 2024 and completing our task this evening, we did a mini fitness session in the playground - after all it's important to keep ourselves active and fit! The team did really well in the circuits based exercises which consisted of ladder exercises; med ball throws and slams; kettlebell swings; cone to cone running and good old fashioned playground hopping and jumping!

We will be sad to see Hamid leave Slough. We hope you will come and visit us and we are always here to help you Hamid so please keep in touch.

And finally….. huge congratulations to Ricky on his London Marathon race yesterday! He smashed it with a new marathon personal best as well as a huge time off his half marathon timing!! And he looked fresh as a daisy when Harsha and I saw him at mile 23(ish) with the GoodGym cheer squad! We are all so proud you!

Next week we will be meeting at Salt hill activity Centre, in Salthill park, Bath Rd, SL1 3SS. Our task is to help Raggy Rd Allotments with their allotment space. We will be walking or running down to the allotments.

Love these tasks at Thanes Hospice of sorting through donation bags into colours and trends.

Block coloured clothes are no issue but when an item has more than one colour on it the conversations get quite amusing as we all try to decipher the main colour, the shade and if it's multicoloured!!

Within one hour we had sorted through 20 bags and re-bagged them into main colours.

This evening we were doing a spot of gardening for St Mary’s Farnham Royal Primary school. The task was to tidy up bed number 2 and get it ready for the children to do some planting. This area of the playground is used by the children as part of their learning garden and like any other garden it needs a bit of TLC.

There was no run for this task as the location of the school didn’t have an accessible road where we could park then run so we made it a ‘make your own way’ session.

But we did have a fitness session lined up!

Great to have Zoe join us on her first Slough session. Thank you for coming along.

And it’s was so so good to see Mehdi return back to this area. His journey from Slough to the Bibby Stockholm barge and back to Hounslow has been a painful one and we have very much have missed having him at the sessions. In the background we had lots of the Slough members petition our local MP for his help in getting Mehdi taken off the barge plus we started an online petition.

I hope all our efforts somehow triggered Mehdi being taken off the barge and bought back closer to us. For this we are very grateful. We even had a rainbow over us tonight celebrating his return.

Easy-Peas-y

With all the rain we’d had recently the task was a nice easy one. Digging up the weeds and turning over the soil was easy peas-y! Nothing beets a bit of gardening. Lucky Peter had bought some ‘adult’ tools but the kiddy sized spades were just as good for us shorter ones!

Within 35 minutes we had completed the task and made it look totally radishing!

Thyme for some fitness!

With kettlebells, med balls and resistance bands as our kit we had 3 sets of 4 exercises on a rep range of 8. Everyone did very well with the root-ine!

Then we finished off with a best out of 5 basketball shots! Hamid and Peter drew at 2 each and went head to head for a final play off!

Ruth took the photo of the night! I never knew I could have flying feet whilst throwing a ball!

Thank you to everyone for coming down tonight to help.

Next week is Earth Day so we will be back at St Mary’s primary school doing something good for the soil!

Be great to see you there!

https://www.goodgym.org/v3/sessions