Four candles?

Five of us headed down to the Batheaston Secret Garden to help give it some TLC. Despite the name, it seems pretty easy to find, and we all arrived there on time to be given the task of helping clear the, um, "less formal" area at the back of the garden including weeding and pulling up a whole lot of Lime Sedge which had taken over in parts. What transpired turned into a bit of a two Ronnies sketch...

"Have you got any Os?" asked Emily, in her best Ronnie Corbett accent

"I’ve got Ls, and some Hs" offered Meyrick, who doesn't always know his Rs from his elbow..

"No, hoes," exclaimed Emily, "hoes for weeding."

They didn't have any hoes, but there were various digging implements for us to use, with which most of us set about clearing the sedge. After trying various methods involving digging tools, the majority settled into a much more efficient system of brute-forcing it up in clumps with our bare hands, which meant we managed to clear the sedge in pretty good time.

That allowed us to start on clearing some Leylandii trees which were starting to talk hold, some maybe person-high already. Although their roots aren't actually that deep, this job definitely needed tools to help, so Jer took a fork and started trying to lever them out of the ground, before unfortunately snapping the end off his implement!

"Have you got four candles?" he enquired.

"No, but I've got a torch on my phone if that'll help?" offered James.

"No! Fork 'andles! Handles for forks," said Jer. "I've had an accident!"

"Did you need a P?" asked Meyrick, still stuck in the earlier part of this run report.

... anyways, in spite of the, err, questionably fictitious hilarity of this fun mission, we did manage to clear a large area at the back of the Not-So-Secret Garden, and finish up another really successful GoodGym mission, readying the site for the next work they’ll be doing there, and along the way we managed to build a really rather impressive "dead hedge" with all of our cuttings, which will apparently decompose down, and provide an excellent habitat for some of the local wildlife.

Warm welcome

A warm welcome to GoodGym first-timer Sam, who's probably read this far and is starting to wonder what sort of weird sitcom cult he's got himself into....