Some 25 souls rocked up to Coffee is My Cup of Tea for this week’s taper run, the last before Sunday’s Hackney Half marathon.

Two opted for a mission to help clear and tidy an elderly London Fields resident’s garden, while the rest us of headed due north to St Matthews’s Church, Clapton, for our task.

With a genteel June breeze caressing our red-shirted critical mass with its heady, gossamer embrace, we duly arrived after a steady 3km jaunt in E5’s Mount Pleasant Road to meet Sean from Patchwork Farmers, part of Growing Communities, a Hackney-based social enterprise that strives to build community-led initiatives to feed urban populations in a more sustainable way.

Sean explained how a section of the land behind the church - one of several micro-sites around the borough – was being cultivated by apprentice growers and a volunteer workteam to provide nutritious, organic salads for its box scheme.

The group quickly split into three, with the majority arming themselves with spades and trowels to help blitz a slug-friendly habitat of weeds lining the raised beds and their prized edible booty. Others shredded unwanted vegetation to be metamorphosed into compost.

The third group made quick work of helping a huge pile of shredded bay tree mulch – which once grew in Hackney’s bucolic parks – disappear via a conveyor-belt of wheelbarrow trips to and from the churchyard.

Only swirling ghosts of its sensuous Mediterranean perfume remained as an olfactory reminder of its recent presence.

Before too long the mission duo re-joined the main group before we all headed back to London Fields as one unified snaking trail of happy humanity.

Chris Warmoll