Five GG Yorkies met at St Nick's for our weekly scything fix.

We came, we scythed, we conquered.

An incredible 46 people turned up for tonight’s double task! Among them were the Considerate Craig and Brilliant Becki who had completed the Yorkshire Wolds Half Marathon on the weekend and Excellent Ed who achieved a 5k PB at Parkrun! As well as this, the Delightful Debs completed her 50th good deed today; make sure to give her a cheer. We also welcomed new starters Superb Sarah, Spectacular Sonja and Courageous Caron to the team!

We had two tasks to do today. I led out a group to Poppy Road to help with St Nicks meadow project whilst Tim led a longer group to St Oswalds Church to help dig up plants.

Tim’s group set to task trying to get some pesky roots up so St Oswalds can re-grass the boundary of their garden. Avoiding the beautiful fuchsia and a carefully cordoned off bees nest they got to task. Tristan had to call for hacksaw assistance when he came against a particularly tree-like root. Jeff however opted for the “yank till it comes out” strategy, dutifully watched by Stef’s best “if I stand here watching I don’t have to do work. Nicky and Jackie did their best work hyping up the difficult fern to dig up. Katie set to a more forensic approach of meticulously investigating every weed. The naughty GoodGymers digging up weeds round the back of the church managed to break a fork in the final minutes…it is unknown how as they apparently didn’t have much to do!

Meanwhile, my group went to Poppy Road to help local volunteers and Jonathon maintain the meadows. In our eagerness we arrived as John was setting up the tools, so we had to wait a few minutes. I started to explain the meadows, to which John was there to correct me…multiple times! The task was a GoodGym classic; scythe, rake, scrape, tidy. After a quick demonstration and safety briefing, we were on it and making quick work of the meadow. After half an hour, everyone already cleared a massive patch of meadow showing more people make quick work!

We are like locusts…I mean that in a good way! - Maddie

Aside from Laura finding a flying ant’s nest, the task went as smooth as can be! After forty minutes we bid farewell and made our way to Scarcroft Green for our fitness session.

We did a slightly modified version of 'Cones of Happiness'; everyone split off into 8 groups and further split into pairs (or threes) and were designated an exercise written on cones. As one person does the exercise, the other ran to a nearby tree and upon returning they swapped, after which they moved on to the next cone. Despite the heat, everybody gave it their all, especially on the dance where Laid-back Laurence casually did an amazing moon walk!

After the session we all congregated to Brigantes as per usual. Delightful Debs even brought flap jacks for us…she is a proper GoodGymer!!

This morning we crushed and bagged thousands of cans. Foil for Snappy had titled the area 'Mount Can', and that was really rather fitting.

Foil for Snappy might seem like a big local community organisation but really it's one woman, Karen, and her husband. They decided to recycle the foil cases from mince pies one December when they realised you could get cash for recyclable metal, and everything they raise is donated to S.N.A.P.P.Y (special needs activities and play provision York).

They have gone from mince pie cases to voluntarily looking after several aluminium recycling bins across the city and were tipped off about a can-filled courtyard.

This courtyard was like nothing any of us had ever seen, 25 years worth of hoarding cans. Piles of cans, bags of cans (within bags of cans), it was like the Russian Doll equivalent where every bag of cans you tipped out there was another bag of cans.

9 of us got crushing, carefully pulling out sneaky steel and bagging those separately.

if it's rusty, it's steel!

Within one hour we could see part of the ground and had filled 25 bags of crushed cans, but our pace accelerated as we'd emptied all the bags and could focus on crushing. I set a 30 minute challenge to finish the lot. Reckon we can do it?

Yes we CAN! (excited Katie)

This was not a clean task. Decade-old beer dregs, coke, tonic, a retro diet pepsi can that probably wouldn't be out of place in a museum. Drips of all sorts of liquid were flying everywhere. We were very relieved not to find anything too disgusting, just one giant spider and lots of snails.

1 hour and 30 minutes saw the courtyard cleared. A total of 43 bags of crushed metal and some very sticky feet.

Karen offered us some refreshing canned mineral water to finish, infinitely recyclable and much better than single-use plastic!