Julia

It was a beautiful night for a spot of gardening. One-by-one the team grew in the picturesque Cemetery park spot, where manager Ken had left us perfect instructions to start tackling the weeds on the main route through the park.

Why were we doing this?

Fast-growing, light-hogging and invasive, Cow Parsley is a Cemetery pest at this time of year. And with the Cemetery’s volunteer source still a little low, our out-of-hours, weed-removal efforts are still very much in demand.

Don’t forget the Goosegrass

So, armed with the speediest weed-removal tutorial from Ken, we set about tackling the Cow Parsley and Goosegrass straying onto the woodland path and numerous gravestones.

Armed with tips and tricks from stem-handling to nettle-sting management, the team worked in a speedy, productive group making their way along the path at record pace, only breaking to shuttle stems and stingers to the weed mountain (more wholesome than it sounds) around the corner.

It was tireless, tiring and terrific fun, as our before and after Cow Parsley pics show.

Before we knew it, it was 8:15 and we were gathering stray stems and saying cheerio.

The Shout-outs

Shout-outs to the whole team who braved nettles, roots and a pollen-tastic environment on this balmy Monday night, to give this valuable community asset and its fantastic team a helping hand.

And the warmest of welcomes to Julia, who joined us from GG Oxford, and Craig, first time GoodGymer. Do come back again soon.

Next week, we’re back with Nancy and her team at Barts Volunteers for our first trip to the Royal London in nearly two years.

Until then.

We had a very wholesome evening in the Oxgrow garden at Hogacre Common.

The community garden is in the process of installing a new irrigation system, which will make watering the garden during dry spells SO much easier. Instead of having to go to and fro from one water source wherever you are in the garden it will soon be possible to just go a few yards to one of many water troughs, making it quicker and less effort to keep the garden watered. All the troughs and pipes were laid out around the garden, but the pipes needed burying - sounds like the perfect job for a GoodGym flash mob!

We grabbed spades, gave a little thanks for the rain earlier in the day which had softened the ground nicely, and got to work digging trenches, laying the pipes in and recovering them (always one or two turf squares leftover at the end however hard you try to figure out how they came out!). We even dug our way through a mound to lay the piping, and despite calls for an axe managed to get the job done with spades, forks and muscles. We managed to get all the long sections of pipe buried, leaving just the joints to sort out. That progress will make it possible for the OxGrow team to mow and strim some of the grass from around the growing beds to keep it from taking over while they figure out the best way to bury the joints in the pipes.

With not quite enough spades to go around the rest of the team set to work weeding the raised beds . Dogging out thistles, detangling bind weed, trying to get to the bottom of dandelion roots. Along the way we enjoyed seeing the asparagus, chard and onions coming up.

Simon from Oxgrow kindly harvested chard, sorrel and a variety of herbs for all of us to take some greenery home after the task. Sorrell = suprisingly tart-tasting but great stirfried.

Delivered some more books to Mrs H. The lady working at the library asked to be remembered to her, she is the daughter of one of Mrs H's friends. Mrs H enjoyed the books and hadn't read them before - fingers crossed for the same result this week!

GoodGymers managed to shift 5 tonnes (or maybe tons? Not sure...) of gravel to make another path in Boundary Brook Nature Park. It was a very sunny day and lots of physical work, but only Chris was brave enough to drink from the allotment tap! We split into one team shovelling gravel, another barrowing it across the site, and Thomas raked it all down to create the new path. We only had one wheelbarrow casualty, when one of the arms fell off Laura's barrow, although it looked like the wheel was about to go on the replacement one too! Highlight of the task was every time Matt B arrived with his barrow and it gave an animal-like whine - or was it really Matt? We'll never know.

A post-path-building trip to the pub was well-earned by all!

Scythes! Spades! Log carrying!

Last night was our first task of the year at Aston's Eyot, and it did not disappoint: There were nettles to scythe and rake, the pond edge to reprofile, and lots of logs to carry over to the pond edge to build a hibernaculum for reptiles to hibernate in.

The pond is a new feature on Aston's Eyot. As it was dug the soil was piled up around the edges and now needed smoothing into a gentler slope. An artistic quartet got to work shovelling and sculpting - with an architect in the group surely the landscaping will be exemplary?!
Meanwhile the rest of the gang ventured into the woodland area and flexed their muscles carrying logs from woods to pond edge to form a pile which will hopefully be an attractive habitat for reptiles to snooze the winter away.
And finally....the scythes were back in action. Happy to report no loss of limbs from over enthusiastic wielding of sharp blades (woo hoo!) and a whole load of nettles were chopped down, which will hopefully allow a bit of breathing/growing space for a wider variety of plants.

Great work team!

Welcome to GoodGym Julian and Laurie - lovely to meet you both.

I delivered some books for Mrs H as part of the Home Library Service. She is my first customer and really nice; I'm looking forward to doing more deliveries for her.