Goodgym Southampton is one year old today!! 🎉🎂

To celebrate we went to city farm with an army of goodgymers ready and eager to help with whatever task Tom may have had in mind for us. We were pretty sure it was going to be more goat mountain shenanigans but were shocked when farm volunteer Danni mentioned that this evening we would be helping put all the animals to bed and meeting them all by means of celebration and thankyou.

We were thoroughly spoilt - getting to feed the sheep and goats, getting walked by the new pygmy boys, putting the chickens and ducks to bed and meeting all the reptiles from the blue tongued skink to the gecko and giant african land snail.

After our tour of the farm we were kindly given use of the community room to celebrate our birthday with cake and drinks kindly supplied by Energise Me and Ellie.

We were also delighted to see Paul and Simon back with us after last weeks litter pick and to welcome Aimee for her first goodgym task.

Its been an incredible year with 157 tasks(!!!). Heres to seeing what year two brings!

We quickly split into two teams to get the job done - the shovelers and the forkers! Shovelers were tasked with loading the wheelbarrows with compost and then transferring it to the beds. With a perfected wheelbarrow wiggle the compost was deposited expertly ready for spreading. Forkers then got to work turning over the soil and incorporating the new compost. With the music pumping, we managed to clear a whole compost bay and get the beds ready for the farm volunteers to plant the Elephant garlic. We look forward to seeing that when it’s grown!

We were initially a bit worried as the gardener had made a surprise visit to the planned community garden over the weekend and cleared a lot of the weeds we were there to tackle! However, after a great "Too weed or not to weed" briefing from the wonderful Gill we had plenty to be getting on with. There was lots of digging deep to get all the Demogorgons out (or roots as some people might term them!). There was also some reaching high for Wilson and Helen to get the brambles out of the tree. We were hoping for some rare artefact finds with all the digging and were not let down with a tiny pink plastic rocking horse and a racing pigeon ring! It was great we welcomed James from Energise Me to his first session this evening. He was a great addition to the team, digging right in! We hope you can join us again soon.