Leticia Bessel

Hestia Older Persons Support have asked us to help with a garden mission for Ms M.

The task will involve removing as many of the weeds and cutting back any overgrowth as much as possible. Tools will be provided but volunteers will need to provide their own gloves. There is side access to the garden, so volunteers won't need to enter the house.

GoodGym have previously helped Ms M with some gardening.

On a rarely bright and sunny Wednesday evening, eight keen GoodGym runners gathered by the kitchen garden at Chiswick House, ready to receive our instructions from Chris the gardener.

Chiswick House's kitchen garden is a regular location for GoodGym Hounslow, and it's great to see the bulbs popping up and flowers opening up as the weather warms up. Today, our first task was to do a spot of tidying; shifting stacks of terracotta flower pots and piles of old slate tiles from out in the working area to being packed away in their storage areas.

Quickly getting that out the way, we moved on to something we've got much more experience with - shifting wood-chip! With Chris and Michelle filling wheelbarrows, Matt doing a zen-like job of raking and everyone else ferrying back and forth, we got stuck into giving the newly formed paths within the garden a thick covering of chips, ready for a season of use by gardeners and visitors.

With the light starting to fade and the garden looking well-refreshed, we said goodbye and headed off; Matt and Eloise on the long trek home, and the others to sit outside on Turnham Green (outside the closed Packhorse!) patiently waiting for the pubs to all reopen...