Upon arrival at the lock-up in Locke Park, we found Amazing Anne and Zealous Zak busy getting all the tools out whilst waiting for us ... and we were early too! We were hoping to have a new Daniel come along for his first session today but something came up.

Two rakes, two wide sweeping brushes, a coal spade, a plethora of rubble sacks and a snow shovel were gathered from the shed and taken up to the Serpentine Walk. With all of the tools and equipment taken out from the store there was now room to store a bike in their which was useful. We had a leafy task to accomplish today and that was to sweep, rake and bag up all of the fallen leaves from beneath the trees in the beds. Some leaves were stuck under bushes, some had blown onto the path, but most were just piled up in the beds. We used rakes on the sloped banks under the trees to get the leaves down to the bottom near the path, from here one of us held open a bag while another picked up clumps of leaves or swept them into the waiting sacks. We all worked together gathering leaves for an hour before Anne had to leave to attend to other duties. GoodGym agreed to stay until all bags were 'full', I invert-commas because the guy who comes to take away the bags won't if they're completely full because of the weight, hence we had to only fill each of them 2/3-3/4 full, or risk the aging gardener refusing to shift them. The wet leaves do weigh quite a lot, so this is fair enough. When the friends of Locke Park left us to our own devices, a few other creatures decided to join us. A couple of robins and a starling were very happy to have newly exposed soil, due to our leaf removals, enabling optimal worm hunting territory.

When the main soil covered area under the trees was cleared, it was time for clearing the area around and above the steel pagoda. This particular area is a real magnet for leaves, and the ones on the ground were soon joined by an induced huge avalanche of leaves from above forming a moldy mountain of matter. This acted as quite a nice crashmat for a quick exit from the bed above too, though I'm not sure how safe it was to do this in hindsight. There were the odd bits of rubbish hidden in the bushes too which we gathered up and placed into a separate clear bag.

When all 9 of the rubble sacks were as full as they could be, they were lined up on the grass ready for collection by a gardener tomorrow. The tools were then placed back in the shed and we rode off into the sunset, leafing behind a much more presentable patch of park!