A gentle walk along the canal was the start of today's task with HANGOT as our team walk to Osterley Lock, the most southerly orchard created by HANGOT. The walk gave everyone a good chance to chat before putting on their game faces and taking on a GoodGym favourite, wiping out brambles.

The first job was to make the front of the orchard, along the canal, look more inviting by clearing brambles and other weeds away. Keeping the orchards looking well maintained encourages the public to come in and discover the tasty delights and calm spaces inside. The whole team got to work, chopping, hacking and raking, making mincemeat out of brambles and other weeds, transforming the front of the orchard.

With the front of the orchard looking neat and professional, it was onto the priority number 2, to clear weeds and brambles from around each of the fruit trees. All of the cuttings were taking to the bramble graveyard on one side of the orchard. As it overflowed and became harder to climb to the top to add cuttings, so eventually GoodGymers started their own pile on the opposite side of the orchard to provide balance and more simply, to speed things up and not walk as far.

Right on time, the tidying was done, leaving task owner Clive really happy with what the team achieved. As a reward, Dora spied something that looked like a pear on one of HANGOT's trees. It was actually one of those mysterious quinces and it was close to being ripe. Scott wasn't so lucky in finding fruit for his brewing experiments as it had been a lean year for British fruit.

Next month, we'll be back at Osterley Lock, blitzing away brambles and more. Look out for a new listing coming soon.

There is a true "tomb" romance between Goodgym Ealing St Mary's church : we were back for more weeding and clearing the tombs around the church. Todays group run became a group walk as only 1 runner and it was quite close so plenty of time to get the the church. Jo cycled to the church and Harvey ran to meet the walking "dead" at the church - dont believe everything I say as the walkers were really alive.

Welcome to Neal and Max for their 1st session. We carried on from our last session here by weeding and doing a great tidy up left and right of where we left it last time as we were 8 - so 2 groups of 4. This avoided us walking on each others "bones". Divide to better conquer the bramble territory. We also removed a lot of broken glass between the tombs but also near the path near the church.

The tomb raiders did a great job today. Well done team.

The fourth expedition to Grove Farm in search of the Unholy Grail of biodiversity - Japanese knotweed - brought together volunteers from the local area, from the far south of the borough, and even from beyond its borders. Mike from Friends of Grove Farm decided to lead the task unusually in the afternoon, due to an earlier event at the Grove Farm Nature Reserve - the Slow Worm Safari. Mike told us that only one specimen had been spotted during the event, while the expected number was ten, which wasn't good news for biodiversity. On a positive note, the sighted slow worm was pregnant, so there's still hope that the local legless lizard family will grow.

The quest to find the highly invasive non-native knotweed attracted adventurers like GoodGymers Giles and Jo, who cycled from the South Ealing and Brentford area, Sevan and Kash, who ran, also from the south, having completed two missions on the way, and Afshin, who returned for the second adventure of this kind in a row. The GoodGymers were joined by a returning explorer, Deborah, and Sue, new to Grove Farm. A team of eight resumed their travel up the Coston's Brook ditch.

The regulars knew the drill, the newbies quickly got up to speed: hedge trimmers, shears, loppers, rakes. Clear the path. Make it wider. Put the trimmings aside. Throw logs away from the trench. Do not hurt the other folks in the process.

Today's discoveries:

• Badger burrows
• A rusty shopping trolley
• A tyre
• A single wellie
• A sandbag-reinforced campsite (a secret bunker entrance?)

But all of those artefacts paled in comparison to what we discovered at the end. Even the knotweed. Oh yes, we eventually did reach the knotweed, although some of us, after three previous sessions, had started to doubt whether we'd find it this year. We left the invasive knotweed alone, acknowledging the mission's success from a distance. Then all the eyes landed on the most unexpected finding, waiting for us under the crown of a large fallen willow whose branches Mike meticulously sawed off.

It was a geocache. Afshin opened the container and found an Elvis CD and logbook with an entry from 23rd May 2005! Everything was soaked, and we couldn't reveal other pages of the notebook without destroying them. The artefact from over two decades ago now needed some drying before getting reinstalled in its location.

Meanwhile, a much younger thing that could be found in the park needed quite the opposite - plenty of water. On the way out of the woods, we visited the black poplar tree the GoodGymers helped plant in December last year and lent Mike a hand in watering it, before returning to the tool container to tidy and lock up the equipment.