It was a pleasure to return to Edith Garden to support the work of Citizen Zoo with Elliot and his team on Tuesday evening. There has been a great transformation since our first visit a couple of years ago. It is now a more beautiful, well-maintained natural space which is litter free and accessible to all.

This local nature reserve is a safe haven for wildlife as well as offering people with disabilities or mental health needs the opportunities to engage with nature. Since our last visit, it now boasts an array of new features including bee boxes, bug hotel log piles, a beautiful pond, hedgehog rehab space and an abundance of well-supported local plant and insect species.

After a brief overview of the space involving many interesting facts about its journey and history (including its previous use as a World War II air raid shelter as remembered by local residents!), Elliot outlined our tasks for the evening. These included clearing the boundaries of the path to maintain the safe access by cutting back any plant life away from the path edges and pulling up any weeds, hacking away at nettles as well as ridding the space of the plant-choking, invasive bindweed .

Many of us chose to brave the nettles and pull at the bind weed. After a good session of clearing, pulling, lopping and hacking, we started to lose the light and had to stop to pack up the tools.

Grateful for Caroline’s baking, we were each rewarded with a homemade brownie! Who knew we could get a brownie and Edith too at our community mission today!

There are more volunteering opportunities ahead with Citizen Zoo at Edith Gardens this Saturday as well as future chances to get inVOLEved in supporting the reintroduction of water voles to the Hogsmill and join in the FestiVOLE ! More details to follow! Watch this green space!

We were in luck with the weather as we arrived at Searchlight to help tidy up the weeds at the front of the centre.

Armed with our favourite weeding butter knives Petra, Jassy, Elenor, Claire and Adam tackled the weeds in between the paving slabs while Marie-Noelle and Rachel battled with the giant weeds in the flower bed.

We had a extra challenge collecting gold confetti from a party and separating it out from the weeds for the compost.

The transformation in just over an hour was remarkable and the flower bed is now ready for some lavender which we look forward to seeing on our next visit.

Thanks to Michelle for hosting us.

On a beautifully sunny evening, a group of us repainted three benches just off Kingston roundabout with Andy from ID Verde. We'd previously cleared the area the difference was stark, with very little rubbish accumulated over the previous 6 weeks and someone actually using the bench (who we gently evicted).

It took an hour and a half to sand and repaint the three benches, accompanied by lots of local government chat.