Bound by Bindweed - Act 2: Panic

After our first mission of the day, we arrived at Ms J and her father's home full of energy after a quick and tasty local lunch. When we got there, the scourge of the mission runner, there was no answer at the door. After a couple more attempts, we called Ms J who said that she had had to take her dad out for some errands. Ms J had tried to call GoodGym HQ with no reply as it was a weekend and she was panicked and apologetic that we'd turned up with no one home. We had 3 hours until our next mission and Kash was determined to do something to help Ms J and her dad, so suggested that we could at least weed the front garden while we waited.

It was while we diving into the flowerbeds that we found our old enemy from Act One, bindweed! Tons of it, all over the place and wrapped around all of the other plants (and weeds) as it does. We did what we could with only our gardening gloves and pulled out as much bindweed as all the other weeds that we found.

We were getting close to finishing the front garden when Ms J arrived home with her dad and a cheery greeting. Amazed by what we'd achieved, we soon had a new and varied list of things that we could help with as neither of them were able to do any heavy lifting or bend to work at ground level.

First up was relocating the father's swing seat that was sinking into the earth with its legs surrounded by grass. Some paving slabs had been purchased for the seat to rest on and they'd been loaded into the car by a B&Q employee, after that, Ms J had no way of getting them out of the car which can't have been great for her fuel economy. Kash and I grabbed a paving slab in each hand - Kash being smarter as she'd kept her gardening gloves on - then walked through the house towards the back garden until we hit (cue dramatic music) a sticky door! With a slab in each hand and our arms getting more and more stretched, we couldn't get through until Ms J eventually rescued us. We lined up the slabs, moved the swing seat (harder than it sounds and the centre of gravity kept moving) and placed it in its new location.

On to our next tasks, I tackled a thorny invading plant with some secateurs and a special, extra thick and protective gardening glove. As an extra bonus, the spiky thing was also covered in bindweed. Meanwhile Kash tried to remove some bitumen roofing from the lean to at the back of the house. In hindsight, we should've switched places as I'm taller than Kash, but she enjoys a challenge. Try as she might, the bitumen panels wouldn't come down without some more dangerous moves, so that task was abandoned and Kash moved on to weeding the flower beds and grass.

By this point we were most of the way through the task and we had a hard stop to make it to our next mission on time. Despite this, we managed in total to fill 4 garden bags with weeds and a rubble bag full of spiky branches.

Before we headed off, Ms J offered us a swing on the seat which we couldn't say no to, thanked us A LOT and then tagged GoodGym_Ealing on Instagram to share the great work we'd done with all of her friends. We left feeling super proud of what we'd achieved, a very fulfilling task.