An un-frogettable Weed-nesday

24 GoodGymers made their way to help the Makespace Oxford in Oxford.

: Wednesday, 23rd of September 2020
: Led by Anwen Greenaway

It's that time of year when we start watching the sky at evening tasks wondering if we'll get everything done before the light fails. Fortunately, despite the gloomy skies we still got away with it this week, and I think we'll manage one more week without having to worry too much about darkness. Time to start locating those headtorches and high vis tops that you've had tucked away since March!

This week was all about weeding, pruning, and litter picking at Makespace in Jericho.

We first tackled this task back in July, and over the couple of months since then the weeds have sprung up and the litter has reappeared. With one eye on the darkening skies we got to work promptly, sending the first arrivals over to tackle the biggest jobs of willow pruning, wall weeding, and ivy clearing. Other teams tackled litterpicking around the car park and weeding front and back areas, as well as a bit of leaf raking for good measure.

Finds of the evening:
* Virtually a whole outfit discarded in various corners of the car park (including a snazzy mask). We really need to start keeping the discarded clothing from litter picks and dressing some scarecrows.
* A frog hiding under the ivy we removed from the building on canal-side
* Pink gin and lemonade

Conversation topics:
* Schools v pubs
* The different approaches of NZ v GB
* How they made us Doubt Everything podcast
* Mask designs
* Different workplace approaches
* Skipping - the perfect COVID-safe exercise? (You can blame Aoife if I bring my skipping rope next week.)
* Kittens

I know it's surprising with all that chatter, but work-and-talk is our USP, so by the time an hour was up we'd cleared the stone wall of weeds, and also much of the overgrown area beside it, got the path to the garden beautifully manicured, picked up 2 bags of litter, pulled down a HUGE pile of ivy and brambles that was creeping up the building and blocking the light, pruned the weeping willow, and scraped and weeded around the garden and carpark.