Leaf-blowing killed the rake-it-up star

Sunday mornings mean Sunday transport. This is an obvious sounding statement that has greater meaning when in the middle of travelling to a Sunday morning mission than at other times (I'm looking at you, overground services!!) My fellow mission mates (Stefania and Dharmesh) had obviously thought of the implications of this statement in advance, as they both arrived to our pre-mission café visit (at least partly) under the power of their own steam. This is probably why a lot of people think runners look smug 🙄😉

Our mission today was to help tidy up Ms M's garden. It had become a little overgrown, with some of the trees overhanging the garden and her windows significantly, blocking her light. As she is no longer mobile enough to do this herself, she gave GoodGym a ring to see if we could help.

After Ms M welcomed us into her home, she showed us through to the garden and outlined the things she wanted us to do. She'd bought plenty of black bags, and had lots of fun tools for us to play with, my favourite being a leaf blower (my second weekend of leaf blowing!) This is how we could tell it was going to be a good mission 😄

For the next two hours, Dharmesh, Stefania and I loped, secatuer-ed, de-weeded and generally tidied up the garden. We tried our best with some of the overhanging branches, but unfortunately we were a bit limited in what we could cut (the branches were a little thicker than the lopers were comfortable with, and the electric saw was a little too power-tooly for us to be comfortable with). I think we made a decent dent in the garden, though, with 11 bags of garden waste being produced (excluding one TV screen, which we felt deserved to be used in some photos (it's made by Grundig, which is close enough to ground-dig to make no difference) and so we kept separate).

Things I learnt about my fellow mission mates on this mission include: Dharmesh particularly likes three-pronged cultivators (he grew fond of mine and would probably like one for Christmas). Stefania is particularly good at smelling foxes/ fox holes. Things they learnt about me: the guilty pleasures I normally listen to 🎶

Garden tidier, we made our goodbyes to Ms M and made our way to the local tube stations via a food market (because they're awesome). Hopefully we've helped improve the environment a little for Ms M and that some better tools will soon be found for the rest of the overhanging branches :)