Nobody’s digging is a raspberry patch on ours

20 runners went to Kings Cross Community Orchard and help with a range of tough tasks

Here is the report from Rachel:

Raspberries like growing in the shade.

Alex, who helps run the King’s Cross Community Orchard project on a patch of marginal space in Camley Street, is passionate about healthy, sustainable food. He’s an advocate of growing food in the ground and not in plastic lined raised beds, which took up a portion of the project space.

Mountains of mud was moved (definitely my hardest workout at GoodGym to date)

Having cleared the raised planters of any remaining strawberries, half the group set about redistributing the soil from the raised beds back onto the ground. Mountains of mud was moved (definitely my hardest workout at GoodGym to date). Now the shady space can be used to grow raspberries in the ground.

The raspberries will be great on Alex’s (adult only) Muesli he kindly gifted to us all.

Here is the report from Pritesh:

And so began the age of Ax…

Fresh from the highs of 50 good deeds, and with Shaun away, Axel stepped up to the mark to lead the group on this fine evening.

Will we get muesli rewards again?

Today’s task had everyone excited as we were going up to Alara Food’s Eco Park (“will we get muesli rewards again?”) for some unknown but ‘tough’ jobs.

After a very French-tinted (oh, he is saying “orchard”) intro and health and safety talk from Axel (so much for your poor English, you were great!) we were all counted up (“there are definitely 18 – 20 of us”) and ready to get warmed up and off to our task.

With Axel leading the way at the front and Mairi holding fort at the back of the group we blasted the kilometre or so up to Alara. This week we had encouragement from some policemen and railway engineers – it seems everyone wants to get involved!

We love weeding!

At Alara we met with Alex Smith who runs the show there and he began to explain the tasks at hand – 3 big jobs today: shifting the remains of a massive compost pile so that a fresh delivery could be brought in, moving tonnes of soil from grow bags to create a raspberry patch and finally some weeding (we love weeding!) around trees that we had helped with plant on a previous task.

I got myself into the weeding task and despite a lack of tools we got everyone involved either actually weeding or collecting up those weeds that had been cleared. By the end of the evening we had collected nearly three wheel-barrows worth of weeds, said ‘hello’ to a rather large moth, disturbed all kinds of creatures (ants, woodlice, a centipede) and even learnt that some nettles do not sting (look for the flowers). The soil around the trees looked a lot more healthier and we hope to see the trees flourishing the next time we are at Alara.

Over in the other tasks, everyone was just as busy! The compost area was cleared which is a great help to Alara and means that they are ready for the next big delivery of compost. Those creating the raspberry patch did a great job clearing 15 grow bags, containing over half a tonne of soil in each, and levelling the soil out ready for to get some shade-loving plants laid down. Whilst not apparent to everyone the soil in the grow bags was very wet meaning that the guys on that task were all pretty muddy looking by the end of…especially Steve, did you wear white on purpose?!

Everyone did so well today that we were in luck and rewarded with some ‘adults only’ muesli, apparently it contained an aphrodisiac, and once we were all ready we set off for the run home. Sounding slightly odd with everyone’s muesli rattling along we set off for the canal with Axel leading us all on a run to make sure the we got a good dose of the gym aspect of goodgym. We headed towards Camden before doing a quick ’about turn’ and heading back towards Granary Square. Amelie and I had a brilliant moment when running down the canal, a guy decided to run with us to find out why he had been passed by 20-odd runners carrying boxes of muesli…we quickly explained whilst he ran alongside and I shamelessly promoted GoodGym too.

After a quick breather at Granary Square we did the short run back to base and after a stretch down we were done for the evening!

We headed off for a well-deserved drink

A few of us were not content with just the run and the good deed so we headed off for a well-deserved drink too and had a catch up and talked about our preparation for Run Hackney and Axel’s mammoth campus2campus challenge! Please visit www.justgiving.com/campus2campus to find out what he’s up to and donate if you can!