Revealing The Secret Garden

On arrival, we spoke to our nonagenarian beneficiary about the job at hand. The garden had been her pride and joy for the 70+ years she's lived in her house but she's now unable to tend it herself. To get maximum impact for her, we decided that cleaning the patio and mowing the lawn were going to be the best jobs to start with.

Thankfully we were provided with a full garage of equipment so had almost everything we needed at our finger tips. Scraping Steve took the patio job. With back breaking effort and lots of pot moving, he managed to completely clean all the moss from the stones which will leave a less slippery surface for a walking frame

Before we could even start mowing the lawn, some work needed to be done to chop back some of the longer grass, enter Kim "The Strim" who took off the top layer of grass and then found the borders with a heavy duty strimmer.

Super Suze took over with the MAMMOTH task of mowing the lawn! With patience and an enormous show of endurance, a beautiful garden was revealed. It was clear that our beneficiary was an avid gardener in her retirement just like she had told us. The worst of the grass was gone and a huge raking was undertaken followed by another mow to try and even out the bits that had been missed first time around. We filled four big garden waste bags with grass and moss which we were able to take to the dump for composting.

A second visit would be good here but hopefully we gave her a really improved sightline through her garden from her seat in the living room.

GoodGym Sheffield is funded by Age Better in Sheffield in association with South Yorkshire Housing Association and the Big Lottery fund. Find out about the project here and sign up to visit an older person with GoodGym and end social isolation in Sheffield here