Monday night brought out a magnificent twelve GoodGymers to ARC, with six running with Steph Ducat from Arsenal stadium, and all 12 rolling up their sleeves to get the towpath garden ready for planting out.

While some of us were still buzzing from Sunday's Arsenal Parade, others were visibly relieved that football had packed up for the season - and that this wasn't a week for litter picking!

Amy from ARC marshaled this particular Red Army into action across three fronts: one crew tackled the prickly job of cutting up and bagging thorny hawthorn branches; another set to work building raised beds along the garden border; and new member Devika and I got our hands well and truly dirty turning the compost heap.

The transformation of this little patch - small in size but brilliantly situated - since our last visit is genuinely impressive. A good night's work, a fresh set of raised beds, and all last night's rain should combine to even more progress and growth by our next visit. Bring it on.

We had a great turn out on bank holiday Monday. Together we filled wheelbarrows with sand and delivered them (along with rake puns) to complete the path through the woods.

9 GoodGymers made a real difference at Kentish Town City Farm!

This lovely group — Caitlin, Deirdre, Emily, Giulia, Jacqui, Karen, Lydia, Matt, and Pritika — caught a well-spent and community-filled morning at Kentish Town City Farm on Sunday!

Together they got everything ready for the Farm's annual May Day celebrations!

💚 Karen and Giulia cleaned fences and took them up to the top field!

💚 Emily and Matt carried an animal cage up to the top field and almost got lost!

💚 Deirdre, Lydia, Pritika, and others helped carry tables a long way!

💚 And everyone hung up bunting!... alongside saying hello to the animals 🐷

Thank you, everyone! And thank you, Emily, for the photos and report!

This week's task was led by fellow GoodGymer, Paul, who had signed up to the Surfers Against Sewage Million Mile Clean - equipping us with some professional litter-picking garb and turning us into bona fide citizen scientists. The mission? To clear (a corner of) Finsbury Park of litter, and play a bit of brand bingo - submitting data on which brands were littering our park.

Steph Ducat, Louise, Da Marcus, and Mehmet ran down from Arsenal Community Hub together, meeting the others at the South East gates of Finsbury Park to get started on the task.

Since becoming a run leader, I've wanted to re-start the old warm-up ritual of doing a register, each person saying their name and then answering a random question. Finally, it began last night - and with a question that turned out to be more apt than I'd realised: "what's your favourite drink?".

Paul, who's preferred tipple is JD & Coke, managed to find not one but three (sadly empty) bottles of Jack Daniels littered around the park's borders; and Louise, who favours Strongbow Dark Fruits, also hit her jackpot, as did Da Marcus with a can of Iced Tea. Sadly I didn't find any kombucha bottles littered around Finsbury Park... 😆

We were treated to an incredible red sunset, and even attracted some questions from other park users about how they could get involved and host similar litter picks in their areas.

Altogether we collected 5 sacks of litter, collectively walking 5.6 miles as we picked - in Paul's words: "legendary stuff 🙌🏻!"

There was lots of excitement for next week's session building paths in Caledonian Park - see you there?