Getting rid of my sweet Cooch-a-Choo

I joined the amazing Gerry, who is the main architect of the La Salle Hotel School. He is giving up hours of his time to see the The La Salle Hotel School come into being and has reached out to Good Gym in order for us to help his project.

Planning to open Phase One in 2021, the La Salle Hotel School will provide vocational training and employment opportunities in catering and hospitality at pre- and post-16 levels to local students, young people from around the city region and our neighbours of Croxteth and Norris Green. Based in the former De La Salle Brothers’ House in the grounds of the De La Salle Academy, when completed the training hotel school will be a fully functioning hotel with 13 bedrooms, restaurant and conference facilities, as well as a kitchen garden supplying both the hotel school and the local community.

One of the urgent jobs, which needs doing is filling 17 raised beds with soil so that seeds can be sewn and food harvested for this autumn, when the college is going to open. And Gerry is pretty much doing this on his own at the moment. Of course things are made more complicated by Covid but I went over and met up with Gerry yesterday and he showed me around what is going to be an amazing project.

We spent an hour filling up some of the raised beds and he introduced me to his arch enemy: Cooch grass. It is an invasive grass, which is really difficult to get rid of so as I was mainly using the wheel barrow to move soil, he was raking it into the raised beds and trying to sift out as many of the roots as possible. After an hour of moving and raking soil we have filled just over one of the raised beds. There are plans for us to do our first Community Mission here when it is safe to attend in small groups at the start of April. It was great to be able to help out and it will be interesting to see how this projects develops.