Eight of us went to help Brunswick Organic Nursery in the beautiful Archbishops Walled Garden in Bishopthorpe. Special shout out goes to Claire who came back early from holiday to spend two hours of her 60th birthday digging. Also to Leanne and James who had already done volunteering and litter picking at YoCoWo parkrun beforehand. Our task was to dig out and level an area of ground outside their woodwork polytunnel. We levelled the ground to 4 inches below the edge ready for hardcore which was going to be tampered down to create a hard standing area for the woodwork group to use in the summer. The leftover spoil was barrowed onto the nearby beds. We dug deeper where the soil was good and refilled with the stony edge soil. As it was a longer tasks we had a tea and cake break in the middle and enjoyed some delicious Brunswick home baked cake. Claire had the additional birthday treat of seeing a kingfisher in the larger garden when we went through to look.

On a misty morning, Leanne and James met at York Community Woodland for some pre-parkrun litter picking.

James had double booked himself as a parkrun car park marshal at the time of the mission, so turned up early to make up for it. He'd already managed half a bag of litter when Leanne cycled past to start litter picking from the other end of the track. She found an abandoned trolley just as her bag was getting too heavy, so made use of it to collect even more litter on the way back to the car park to return the trolley (and see James in full marshalling flow).

Unfortunately there weren't any bins in sight to leave the collected litter, so they had an extra workout carrying it 800m back down the track before joining the parkrun crowd for a quick(ish) 5km run.