What a great way to start the weekend with a GoodGym Community Mission at Salvation Army in Camberwell.

Six GG runners slowly made out of work (home) and coming from all directions to assemble outside Salvation Army to be greeted by Janet.

Janet showed us around the plot, identifying two areas that needed to be spruced up: the front/side area and the back parking lot area. We had our gloves and limited tools, but we split into two teams and tackled away at the overgrown bushes, weeds and soil that had gathered in the wrong places.

It was great to see a mixture of "Old-timers" GG members and newbies. Big shout out to all of them for starting their weekend and using their Friday evening to help out:

• Steve, thanks for coming and tackling the front entrance. Hopefully, you had a great time at your friend's event.
• Emma, thank you for making this GG mission your second this year (but like 12th in 5 years) and hopefully, we can start getting you to come to more! 😊
• Nicky, great to see you and the bump... I'll see you on Monday, but have a great weekend!
• Karen, awesome work at the back ensuring the parking bays looked spotless and hope you enjoy your first hairdresser experience since lockdown over the weekend!
• Rosie, great work at the back too and thanks for organising the baby prams at the back. There's always gardening tasks popping up and be sure to check out the farm missions... If they haven't filled up by now.

Community missions are back on! Yay!

This morning 7 runners showed up at Balin house to help the Tabard Growers on their mission to make the rails around 'Beautiful Balin' garden beautiful. They had already scraped sanded and painted half of the 32m of rails around the garden a lovely green. We came in to help with the rest. We each donned our gloves and armed with Stanley knives set about scraping decades worth of old paint off the rails. We soon found it was quite a therapeutic task that was difficult to stop (there's always another patch you could scrape). Eventually though we all pulled away to go home for lunch. There's more to do, but we can't wait to see what it looks like when the rest of the rails are painted to match!

6 of us met at Age Uk to help clear their garden today. It's normally a day centre and the garden is used by its visitors for growing veg and flowers and as a nice place to sit. But since lockdown no one has been able to tend to the weeds and they have got a bit out of hand. . The 6 of us pulled out weeds, chopped back hedges, strimmed the lawn and waters the plants. We even harvested a couple of potatoes by mistake. . It was a boiling afternoon and after an hour we all felt like baked potatoes but the garden was looking a lot better!