Wednesday marked a return to Orchard Triangle to help the Marston Community Gardeners. The warm wer weather has been heaven for cow parsley, and all of the young fruit trees were surrounded by head-high weed growth. Our task? De-cow parsley the fruit trees, weed a good circle around the base of each tree and mulch with a barrowful of woodchip.

Setting to work, we unearthed most of the central patch of trees - featuring figs, apples and pears. Our battle against the bitey evening midges continues, but I think we're starting to win with the new additions to our arsenal (Avon Skin so soft spray, citronella bracelets, long trousers).

Welcome to GoodGym Andy!

KEEN are an award-winning youth-led organisation. They create inclusive projects, and support and promote inclusion in Oxfordshire. The KEEN participants are a group of children and young people with a wide range of disabilities - they love gardening and allotment sessions provide benefits to their wellbeing, time outside and the chance to gain new skills and new friends.

The KEEN team are unable to take on the more physically demanding tasks necessary to prepare the allotment for the 2024 growing season, so they called in the GoodGym flash mob to help.

We've never been to the Elder Stubbs allotment site before, so it was lovely to see the Restore and KEEN plots as well as the fun driftwood sculptures. The main task for the evening was to weed the vegetable beds and dig them over a bit ready to receive the seedlings ready to go in the ground which are currently housed at KEEN's base near South Park.

An hour and many mozzie bites later we'd made a significant difference to weed quantities, which will allow KEEN to get participants in to start gardening as soon as possible!

Welcome to GoodGym Sarah, Hei, and Wiktoria!

A huge pat on the back everyone: we made it through the winter! The clocks change this weekend and it'll be return of light evenings from next week.

Ovada are a non-profit gallery space with limited funding and a small staff team. Car park hire is a key source of income that enables them to run events, exhibitions of socially engaged work, and an education programme where they offer a number of subsidised and bursary places.

With only a small staff team it is hard to keep on top of maintenance, so they called in our GoodGym flash mob to get their car park area ship shape.

Bundled up against the spring showers we litter-picked, shifted rubbish out for collection, weeded, and pulled up nettles (achieving the first nettle stings of the year).

In the hour before the light faded we got the area looking a lot better and less nettley. Now we just need some dry weather for the mud situation to improve!