A lovely sunny Saturday morning saw 6 cheery GGers gather on the Ham Lands for Sufiyo’s last mission before her move back to her native Sweden.

The tasks at hand were multiple, but we started with the heaviest work which was piling up mulch into 2 massive piles. It was hard work, aided by rakes, forks and a pitchfork wielded by farmer Sal and made more difficult (and painful) by regular scratches from the brambles in and around the mulch.

Once we had finished dealing with our piles, we forked off into smaller groups to deal with other tables. Firstly, we moved a load of tree branches, before dividing between a group of litter pickers (who headed off into the trees to find trash) and a group of bramble choppers.

The weather was scorchio at times so the water break was welcome and we were grateful to be working in the shade of the trees for the second part of the task.

We bid a fond farewell to Sufiyo and headed our various directions to enjoy the rest of the lovely weekend.

I really enjoyed helping weed around some hedging plants by Hogsmill and then removing some bramble from Kingston Cemetery to help improve and protect habitat for yellow meadow ants. Beautiful weather, good company and worthwhile tasks.

From Alison of Kingston Biodiversity University Group 'Thanks to Good Gym and a great task along the Hogsmill yesterday. This included: painting the benches; removing flytipped rubbish; cutting up discarded debris; and weeding around the hedge that was planted last year. When finished we went into the cemetery to take the young bramble growth off the yellow meadow ant mounds. There are two pairs of grey wagtails nesting along this stretch of the Hogsmill, its a good place for house sparrows and we had a good view of a great spotted woodpecker in a young ash tree.'