Bad jokes happen when you have a little bit of a sore throat in a vegetable garden, and you have really missed going out on a Goodgym community task!

We also had the privilege last night of having two James' and a Jami on the task, as well as me and Mark.

Arriving at the task after a chat about data and reporting (sorry James) we set about tidying the place up a bit. A lot of weeding, chatting about which weeds are actually good, or at least impressive in looks or resilience (hello bindweed). A lot of sweeping, jumping in weed/compost piles (Mark), and litterpicking.

All resulting in a much-improved space at the centre of the estate, and more of a clean slate for the summer. And soon we'll be back to do the fence painting when the weather's a bit better.

Well done team!

We had an eventful start to Saturday's dig with a cheeky pony on the loose in the muck heap! After some attempts at herding Alfie back to his pastures, the pros from the farm coaxed him back home and we got stuck into digging out the drain channel. A short and speedy attempt this week - but good progress and quite a lot of depth reached. We'll be back next Saturday to keep going ☺️

For this week’s task we returned to one of our longstanding tasks, Alexandra Recreation Ground, and their current project to repaint the metal fence that extends around the children’s play area. Last year we helped scrape the paint off the Alexandra Road side of the fence before the park’s Friends group repainted it, and this year they’re doing the Maitland Road side.

The GoodGym group met at the Bridge House before we took the short run along the High Street, into Penge Lane and under the railway bridge, then up Parish Lane to meet Millie.

She doled out wire brushes and we got to work, scraping off old paint and lichen. 40 minutes of work got the fence looking less flakey - a great start to this round of work.

We kicked off the evening naming ourselves and expressing which form of art we would give a go if we could, from improv comedy to lino printing to songwriting. After a nice jog through Crystal Palace, admiring the newly regenerated Italian Terraces, we arrived back at the Paxton Centre for our second annual table tightening championships.

The Paxton Centre is an arts cafe/workshop space with a built in gallery. It's cool. They're also a non-profit. Super cool.

We upturned the tables, unscrewed the legs, tightened them up on the inside, rescrewed them on, and levelled them out with the bits at the bottom. I'm not sure who won the championship. Everyone I guess.

After that we took a photo on the stairs as if we're Blazin' Squad and set off on our merry way.

Nice one, team. 🔥🔥🔥🔥

Emma, Mark, and Catherine spent a few sunny hours back with the ace Fieldwork Project on Saturday, continuing to dig the trench for a French drain (see photos for progress!) and painting their lovely big table in the polytunnel. We also had a go at excavating a big bit of flint that is sticking out into the trench - it probably needs a bit more work but it had a good wobble by the time we finished up. Ever the wonderful hosts, the Fieldwork team then fed us with some phenomenal home-made chips and Shakshuka, shared more about their work with wool from the farm, and took us to meet Bobby and the other sheep who live there.

Five GoodGymmers ran from Penge to Beckenham Place Park last night where we met with James and Tilly from the BPP Ranger team over at the newly-landscaped East Gate area. This was our longest group run in a while and, after some initially confused weather (sunshine and hail?!), we were treated to a beautiful rainbow as we made our way up to Beckenham Hill.

Once we arrived, our task was to move woodchip onto the new flowerbeds to help to suppress pesky weeds. After 40 mins of shovelling, we made our way back through the park and enjoyed the last of the evening sunshine.

Well done team!