A ple-flora of fauna in merry weather

After last night's GoodGym London Christmas party, I rocked up to Dr A's at 11am for a gardening mission with Adam (very glad of both the dry weather and the late start!)

Dr A is a keen gardener and has a beautiful, large garden (he's nutured many of the trees in it since they were seedlings). Unfortunately he's become less mobile as he's gotten older and has also had to spend more time acting as a carer for his wife. This has led to the gardening work getting on top of him and becoming a bit of a safety hazard, which is where we stepped in to help 😄

On looking at the garden, we could tell instantly that this was likely to be one of those missions that you can spend ages on and have it not look like very much at all.

Thankfully though, Dr A had us focusing on a very small patch of his garden, which meant that we could at least see that we were making a dent in it! He gave us a walk through of his entire garden however, naming a plethora of flora (a ple-flora?), offering us some home grown raspberries and introducing us to the shed of GoodGym's dreams, which contained pretty much every type of gardening tool you could imagine. Adam and I were especially enamoured of the shredder, which Dr A used to shred some of the green waste we produced.

Our tasks for the day included emptying out some dead plants and soil from a number of pots on a small patio, clearing the patio, and decanting some bleach from a large container into some old milk bottles.

Strangely, emptying the plant pots was probably the most complex part of our entire mission. It would have been relatively straight forward, but some of the larger plants had soil cleaving stubbornly to their roots. Adam had a great technique for helping to divest the roots of their soil, which involved swinging them at a fence very hard while squatting to avoid some awkwardly located tree branches. I feel like this is a particularly GoodGym type of workout. My swinging efforts being entirely non-noteworthy, I instead concentrated on building soil-castles and not being too repulsed by the large number of exceedingly fat worms at the bottom of most of the pots. I was successful in one of these endeavours.

Adam may also have done a lot of the rest of the work in clearing the patio as I concentrated on passing Dr A some sticks to shred (occasionally secateur-ing) and chatting to him about his home and family. I blinked and Adam had quickly swept and weeded the patio, moved the pots and had done pretty much everything else that needed doing. An excellent mission mate :)

A couple of hours or so after starting, we packed away the tools and discussed possible gardening tasks for another mission before making our goodbyes. I feel that whoever goes back (& Adam is keen to) will benefit hugely from Dr A's wealth of gardening knowledge and will definitely enjoy playing with all of the gardening toys available 😀