Clearing Homerton Forest

On a beautifully sunny morning on 1st August Sarah, Yurena, Andrew and I (Paul Bown) arrived in Homerton to help Yilmaz, an isolated man who is bed-bound, clear his back garden. By 10am when the mission started Sarah had already done a Parkrun PB in Hackney Marshes, well done Sarah!

We were instructed to find the tools left by the council hidden in the garden, we were just able to push open the gate and Paul jumped in to Homerton Forest, after a quick search we found shears, gloves and spades. We quickly established a system of clearing, piling and bagging up the weeds. Paul and Andrew took the lead in the cutting back the weeds, trees and plants, while Yurena and Sarah did the brilliant job of packing the waste into sacks and piling them up at the recycling point around the corner (good find Sarah).

With the excellent shears and hand-cutters we able to cut back around 7 small trees, which had grown extensively in height and width, leaving both Yilmaz's house and his upstairs neighbours deprived of natural light. Through brilliant team work we were able to dig up a whole tree from it's roots, which was incredibly satisfying - one more GoodGym achievement ticked off!

The sorry state of the garden (forest) further develops our Untidy Garden Theory. If you are not familiar with this it's the theory where if you have an overgrown and/or untidy garden the local community/passers by are more likely to throw waste and rubbish in said garden. This consequently affects the quality of the soil in the garden and can create a further mess etc. Consequently the theory is that if a garden is tidy, weed free and GoodGym clean then a lot less rubbish is thrown in said garden. This is the second case study of the theory, more will hopefully follow and thus the theory will develop.

In the last 30 minutes of the 2 hour mission we focused on bagging up all the weeds, waste and rubbish we could. We found everything from a football to an empty can of Stella among the forest, hopefully this littering will end now due to the great work of the team. As you can see by the photo we filled, packed and piled up at least 25 bags full of rubbish - excellent job!

With the mission complete (and us all feeling very happy with our work), we said our goodbyes to Yurena, munched on Sarah's homemade banana muffins (tasty stuff) and headed to Stratford to help out at the Mobile Garden Mission. 2 missions & 5 hours of GoodGyming in 1 day woop woop!

If you're are interested in the coach runs but apprehensive about the expectations of the volunteering then I'd certainly advise doing some missions to isolated people's homes like Yilmaz's, it's a great way of developing your confidence and learning you can commit to the befriending programme. For more details about missions, the befriending programme and getting your DBS sorted please email Steph (she is very helpful) on steph@goodgym.org.

Over and out - another mission bites the dust!