Today was the day for GoodGym's annual spring session in Elthorne Triangle with HANGOT. Like previous years, the aim was to prepare the fruit trees and walnut tree in the orchard to give the local community the best chance of picking some fruit in the summer. The difference this year was that the 10 amazing GoodGymers present blitzed through the task with half an hour to spare.

The session started with a GoodGym classic, mulching! Unlike last month's session with HANGOT, the wood chip was sitting at the top of the hill instead of the bottom, so today team had the slightly easier task of wheeling it down to the trees in need and spreading it around the trunks.

In the orchard, Mirjam, one of the long running HANGOT members, was giving GoodGymers and others lessons about the orchard. They learned some interesting facts about the weeds that the team were tackling:

"You can tell this is hemlock because of the purple splodges on its stems."
"Where you see it, there can be up to 7 years worth of seeds in the ground already."
"That means we need to catch it early, before it seeds, for 7 years to kill it off." - Mirjam

So all of the hemlock and burdock, no matter how small, needed to be found and chopped. Iram took special pleasure in slicing young burdock stems after being attacked by it at last month's task. Surprisingly, the team also learned that nettles are actually good for something:

"The nettles are good for increasing biodiversity."
"That will enable children to come to the orchard as an educational space." - Mirjam
"Do you mean educating them not to touch the nettles?" - Sevan

Despite the breaks taken for bad jokes, the team made fast progress. With the areas around the trees mulched and the unwanted weeds chopped, everyone was wondering what the next job was. There wasn't one. The team had ticked off everything on HANGOT's list in a hour, so they went early to a local coffee shop for today's social.

Great work everyone!

Four grown up GoodGymers and one MiniGymer met at St Margarets Open Space to pick the litter as a part of LAGER Can's Great British Spring Clean, a bold initiative aiming to pick all 146 parks in the Ealing Borough over the second half of March. 45 minutes was more than enough to tidy up the pledged space, so the team cleared the path (and its surroundings) leading to the Fox pub as well. Well done everyone, big or little rubbish fighters!