If anyone tells me that burdock removal tasks throughout the summer can ever get boring, I'll ask them to think twice! Last Tuesday evening's session started like an action film, with three runners: Sevan, Steph Ducat and Kash, galloping at race pace and adding an extra kilometre and a half to retrieve a mission-critical item for the evening: the tool store keys that Kash had forgotten at home. What this extreme heat does to our brains!

Fortunately, the legs coped better with the heat than some of the brains. The racing trio arrived only two minutes late, while cyclists Amy and Scott and walkers Yonas, Harvey and Richard were already waiting at the task. The action-film atmosphere continued as Kash navigated the site's complicated security system and finally liberated the tools.

Eight GoodGymers grabbed a pair of wheelbarrows, a couple of spades and a collection of loppers, then set off to face all the burdock in Elthorne Park they hadn't tackled at last month's session and which had had time to grow. Many of the plants had already started producing sticky burrs. Amy and Kash, with hair a bit longer than the rest of the group, could testify to that.

"Actually, those burrs don't stick to my hair. It's my hair that sticks to them." – Amy.

Hitching a ride in people's hair and clothes or dogs' fur is burdock's prime strategy for travelling long distances and colonising new territory. And that's not its only trick. A single plant can produce thousands of seeds, allowing it to spread rapidly and outcompete surrounding plants for sunlight, water and nutrients. That's why GoodGymers regularly visit Elthorne Park in the summer to keep its expansion in check.

This time, the ranger asked us to focus on the outliers - not the dense patches where burdock was already established, but the lone plants and small clusters threatening to spread across the fields and along the paths.

After clearing the path on the way to the main burdock patch, the team spread into smaller groups across the large field, venturing almost as far as the Bambi statue. Everyone did a tremendous job, greatly reducing the spread of burdock across the park. A special thanks goes to Yonas and Scott, who tirelessly wheelbarrowed the cut plants to a pile away from the main visitor routes.

It was Scott's very first GoodGym session, but you'd never have guessed it - he tackled burdock like a seasoned pro. Well done, Scott, and welcome to GoodGym! We're hoping to see you again soon.

After another successful evening keeping Elthorne Park's burdock under control, we're already looking ahead to the next adventures. This weekend we'll be back in Hanwell helping HANGOT maintain their community fruit orchards, and next Tuesday Sevan will lead us to Perivale to support Impact Theatre by sanding walls ahead of painting. We are hoping to see you there!

After a one-hour lunch break, the notorious Hanwell taggers Kash and Harvey returned to Elthorne Park to continue marking stall pitches for the upcoming Hanwell Carnival. This time, they were joined by Yonas, who had visited the park the previous week to help remove invasive burdock.

The final task of the day for the Carnival started — despite everyone's best efforts to keep the string used for marking rectangle sides tangle-free — with unravelling a long, knotted piece of twine. Fortunately, GoodGymers develop remarkable endurance for untangling strings, Christmas lights and bunting over the course of their volunteering careers, so the knotty challenge was soon overcome.

With the twine restored to working order, the three GoodGymers joined volunteers Sue and Mina for the main job. Rectangle sides were measured, angles checked and then double-checked, sections tagged, and the whole operation repeated for another cluster of stall pitches - all under the scorching sun.

Just when the team thought they were done for the day, they discovered there were two more rectangles left to mark out - and rather unusual ones. Unlike all the previous pitches, whose dimensions had been given in feet, these came in metres: 40m by 18m. That was quite a box to draw!

The continental European GoodGymers had no trouble switching from imperial to metric (in fact, the system made much more sense to them), and the team powered through the final two rectangles, squeezing the last drops from the spray cans to mark the lines on the grass. Luckily, those final boxes didn't need to be divided into smaller sections. Did the European rectangles come with their own Schengen areas? We'll never know.

Before long, the grass-marking operation was complete.

"You are magnificent." - Des, the task owner.

And after a full day of measuring, tagging and line-marking in the heat, nobody was going to argue with that assessment.

On Monday morning, a trio of GoodGymers helped unload the deliveries at the St Mary's food cupboard: the regular Martin, very active new joiners Yonas and Anna, and the honourable guest Afsar, who lives 6000 kilometres away from London, but loves GoodGym and always gets involved in many tasks every time he visits his family in Ealing. How amazing is that!

I am delighted to join GoodGym after two years gap and undertake the task at the food cupboard in South Ealing's St Mary Church. It's a wonderful task and to met with Goodgym team. - Raja Muhammad Afsar