It's been two years since GoodGym Ealing popped up at Popesfield Allotment for a task - can you believe it? While we supported Cultivate London at their projects in Acton and Hanwell, it was high time to revisit the plant nursery at the youngest allotment site in Ealing. And what did we see? The plant nursery has been doing well, but the membrane underneath the pallets with plant pots needed some TLC.

Steph, Sevan and Kash ran a short distance to Popesfield, but for Steph, the difficulty didn't decrease with the mileage as he carried a huge work backpack, worthy of standing for a military training rucksack. The three met Harvey and Maxime, the latter recently having led his first session as TaskForce - congratulations, Maxime! Maxime had led a weekend task nowhere else but in Popesfield, so everyone was hoping to use his know-how about opening all the locks to get to the site and the tools. Fortunately, the instructions were clear, and the team didn't need to rely on specialist knowledge.

The job was simple: pull out the weeds creeping out from the black membrane in front of the sheds, sweep debris, and place all the waste in a tonne bag. Five GoodGymers approached the big job with zeal and thoroughness, pulling the grass from the membrane like there was no tomorrow. In an hour, they cleared the weeds and gravel from the whole open area of the membrane, leaving only parts of the paths between pallets unfinished.

What a thorough job! I am truly impressed, and you say you are not gardeners? - Romina, task owner from Cultivate London.

Next week, GoodGym Ealing opts for an indoor task at the Tuesday group run (just about when it starts getting lighter and warmer in the evenings!). We will be helping to clean and organise a children’s activity space at St Mary's in South Ealing. Sign up now!

After the HANGOT task a few of us grabbed a well deserved coffee at Momentum in Hanwell. It certainly gave us the momentum to keep going. Some people had to run off to other tasks (GoodGym or otherwise) and others stayed for a chit chat. Well deserved after a chillier morning of gardening!

Today's Acton Junior parkrun was full of changes as usual. Before the start, there were lots of swaps being discussed, with a few of the GoodGymers wishing that that could take someone else's role. Harvey could have done without the pressure of time keeping and Maria, who was tail walking, wasn't in the mood for grumpy or crying children today.

Kash and Sevan were pretty content marshalling, along with Hassan who was up bright and early for his first good deed. Hassan had joined for a social run earlier in the year and was back today to help the Junior parkrun run smoothly. Welcome to GoodGym! 👏🥳. Finally, Joanna was cool as a cucumber, time keeping alongside Harvey, trying to ease the pressure.

The main drama was a Greener Ealing van that decided to invade the course and was moved on by the Run Director just in time for the runners to get going. The driver said that they were in the park every Sunday morning, so they should already have known to stay out of the way. Even Maria had a quiet time today as all of the children were happy to be running around the course, from the front of the field to the back.

To reach the Care4Calais on late Sunday morning, Sevan and Kash ran from Acton up and down Hanger Hill. At the task location, they met James, who had arrived for his first task in Ealing. The fourth musketeer slot had been filled by one of Tamzin's recent regular volunteers who himself lived in a hotel for asylum seekers that Care4Calais supported.

The challenge task owner Tamzin had this spring was the abundance of stock (partially due to other C4C storage spaces handing her their goods) and a halved number of requests from the hotels. Those were generally good problems to have.

Sevan joined Tamzin in making custom packs, while Kash, James and the third volunteer sorted through loads of women's and men's clothes. If you think the abundance of outfits made it easier for Sevan to find a t-shirt for a woman who had requested it, think again. He had to dig through the layers of tangled long-sleeved tops in the overflowing boxes and couldn't even reach the most suitable one, which must have been buried underneath.

Meanwhile, for the sorting crew, the task of putting filtered clothes away was the main challenge: squeezing things in, finding the overflow bags for the surplus items and making new containers for clothes that were impossible to fit anywhere. Despite having to virtually bend the rules of physics to find homes for all the outfits, the team smashed sorting the whole huge batch of donations in two hours!

Notable finds:

• Christmas-themed Elf movie pyjamas
• An elf hat
• Skull socks (sadly, not suitable for refugees)
• A straw fedora hat
• African headscarves
• A Minion's costume

Today was the day for GoodGym's annual spring session in Elthorne Triangle with HANGOT. Like previous years, the aim was to prepare the fruit trees and walnut tree in the orchard to give the local community the best chance of picking some fruit in the summer. The difference this year was that the 10 amazing GoodGymers present blitzed through the task with half an hour to spare.

The session started with a GoodGym classic, mulching! Unlike last month's session with HANGOT, the wood chip was sitting at the top of the hill instead of the bottom, so today team had the slightly easier task of wheeling it down to the trees in need and spreading it around the trunks.

In the orchard, Mirjam, one of the long running HANGOT members, was giving GoodGymers and others lessons about the orchard. They learned some interesting facts about the weeds that the team were tackling:

"You can tell this is hemlock because of the purple splodges on its stems."
"Where you see it, there can be up to 7 years worth of seeds in the ground already."
"That means we need to catch it early, before it seeds, for 7 years to kill it off." - Mirjam

So all of the hemlock and burdock, no matter how small, needed to be found and chopped. Iram took special pleasure in slicing young burdock stems after being attacked by it at last month's task. Surprisingly, the team also learned that nettles are actually good for something:

"The nettles are good for increasing biodiversity."
"That will enable children to come to the orchard as an educational space." - Mirjam
"Do you mean educating them not to touch the nettles?" - Sevan

Despite the breaks taken for bad jokes, the team made fast progress. With the areas around the trees mulched and the unwanted weeds chopped, everyone was wondering what the next job was. There wasn't one. The team had ticked off everything on HANGOT's list in a hour, so they went early to a local coffee shop for today's social.

Great work everyone!

Look who is back?Who let Jp out of Richmond? Good to see JP back in Ealing 2 weeks in a row to help with the cleaning and packing at the Friday Hub. Am sure Aruj and the team don't want to let JP go as his floor cleaning is tip top!!So shiny.