My third and final task in Southall on a dry, hot Saturday was mowing the front and back gardens for Ms M. The weather was perfect for this kind of job, although I have to admit the heat did start to take its toll on me before I reached the mission location.

The front garden turned out to be a quick win. The grass was quite long, but I was given a small Bosch mower, which proved to be a surprisingly powerful little beast and made short work of it.

For the second part of the task, I took the mower and extension cable through to the back garden - and what I found was more of a jungle than a lawn. The grass was almost as tall as me (not that I’m particularly tall, but still), and it looked more like material for a strimmer job than something a mower should reasonably handle.

The Bosch beast didn’t disappoint, though. We became a solid team out there - her brute force and my GoodGym know-how were a match made in gardening heaven. I lifted the beast's front wheels to attack the grass at an angle - a trick learned from previous extreme lawn-mowing missions. The main challenge wasn’t just the grass, but what was hiding in it. As it came down, all sorts of litter were revealed: food packaging, cans, plastic bags, and even socks, which proved particularly unpleasant when they got tangled in the mower's blades. At one point, I also uncovered several balls - one of which was claimed by a boy from a neighbouring garden, who popped his head over the fence to see what was going on.

Using the Bosch mower, I couldn’t help thinking of Hieronymus Bosch, and as the garden transformed, I couldn’t quite decide what I was looking at - a slice of heaven in the tidy grass, or something closer to hell once all the hidden debris came to light.

By the end, the back garden was finally brought under control. I left it in a much more manageable state for Ms M and her family to maintain - otherwise it felt like it could easily slip back into a Bosch-like purgatory state of a never-ending cycle of overgrowth.

After a few months, Sevan and Kash returned to Southall Tiny Forest to find it had really gone for it - grass and wildflowers everywhere, with the whole space feeling a bit more wild and untamed than before. The wildflowers in particular were doing well and added a nice burst of colour across the site.

Before getting into the planned citizen science, they were greeted by a less charming discovery: litter around the benches. Food packaging, bottles, cans, single-use vapes, and plenty of cigarette butts were scattered around. Kash also found an unexpected magic wand, which was briefly put to use to make most of the rubbish disappear (cigarette butts, unfortunately, proving stubborn even for magic).

With the area tidied up, they moved on to the main task: a wildlife survey as part of biodiversity monitoring. They recorded and counted insects across the site, including butterflies, various pollinators, dragonflies and ground dwellers like ants, larvae, and slugs. Some species were tricky to identify due to their speed and their general commitment to not being looked at closely.

Compared to previous visits, they noticed more butterflies and a greater variety of species overall, which was a positive sign for the Tiny Forest’s development. Findings were logged onto the Earthwatch digital platform before the two GoodGymers split and headed off to their next task.

On this very summery Saturday, nine GoodGymers joined Janpal and Ash at Western Road Urban Garden in Southall for a community day. As usual, our favourite Southall task owners left the most exciting, most technical and most physical tasks for our brilliant team!

The main task of the day was to pick up where we had left off during our previous sessions at the polytunnel and finish transforming the area around it.

Before we started, we got to see what had been happening on the path we created a couple of months ago on the less visible side of the polytunnel. Ash proudly showed us a new beehive that had been installed there and told us he had already tasted honey produced by the Western Road Urban Garden bees, harvested not long ago.

Janpal also gave us his famous tour of the urban garden, showcasing the many ways it supports the local community, from the vegetable plots and raised beds used by community groups and schools to the exotic produce grown in the polytunnel, which is supplied to local food banks, where fresh fruit and vegetables are often among the hardest items to source through donations.

The tour was especially valuable as we welcomed not one, not two, but three new joiners: Keise, Barnaby and Mandeep. With gardening backgrounds ranging from years of farming and flower-growing to complete gardening beginners, they all quickly got stuck in. Alongside regulars Sevan and Steph Ducat, and the legendary walking duo Danny and Kat - who had already covered 10 kilometres before the task even began - the team got to work. Together, seven GoodGymers tackled the main task, battling through hard, dry soil to remove weeds and the old membrane before laying a layer of terram (stellar work on that, Kat, Mandeep and Keise!) and finally covering the area with woodchip, laid at speed by Sevan, Barnaby, Danny and Steph.

This left Freya and Kash to take on a very different task: digging and moving dried mud. However strange that combination of words may sound, it was needed to reinforce the base for a new water tank. As Janpal and Ash explained, they have been struggling with water pressure at the urban garden, and watering the many plants during such hot weather has become a demanding task that Janpal has had to undertake every other day. To help solve this issue, we had previously assisted with digging the hole for the foundation for new large water tanks that would be installed.

Freya and Kash spent most of the session filling the sides of the frame with soil and securing the area by pegging a membrane around the edges. Along the way, they had great fun putting a landscaping tamp into action and discovering that it's slightly larger and heavier than the ones used to make an espresso.

To get ahead of the water tanks' installation, Barney and Keise took on the satisfying task of smashing bricks and other construction debris unearthed during previous sessions into smaller pieces. Far from simply letting off steam, they were creating ballast for the concrete base that will support the new tanks. At Western Road Urban Garden, nothing goes to waste!

As always, the GoodGym team was treated to the generosity of Southall Community Alliance and enjoyed plenty of fresh fruit, along with some amazing samosas freshly baked by a local shop that Janpal had brought along.

Before leaving Western Road Urban Garden, we completed one final task: emptying a small water tank by abundantly watering the plants in the polytunnel. We then helped Ash fix the filling mechanism and secured the tank with wedges to level it properly. What a fulfilling Saturday morning it was!

We're now getting close to the final stage of installing the new water tanks, which will involve a bit of concreting and hands-on engineering - no prior experience required! The project will make a huge difference, helping Janpal and Southall Community Alliance tackle ongoing water pressure issues and reducing the need for time-consuming manual watering during the summer. To help the polytunnel produce survive and thrive through the hot months ahead, we'll be scheduling this task soon, so watch this space.

Back at the Soup Kitchen and a session in the tea station for me today. We didn’t have the queues of last week but there was a steady flow of guests coming through. The addition of cereal is very popular and this morning there were chocolate eclairs which went like hot cakes!

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.

The scorching sun had already climbed high above Elthorne Park, and the meadows where Hanwell Carnival was about to take place offered very little shade. Since the morning, Kash had been battling tangled strings, Pythagorean geometry and an acrylic line marker alongside a couple of Carnival volunteers. Luckily, reinforcements were on their way.

At 11:00, GoodGymers Angela, Chris and Harvey arrived to lend the event organisers a hand in setting up Hanwell's big community celebration. Little did they know that their task would involve marking out stall pitches rather than assembling gazebos.

"I've marked football pitches before." - Harvey.
"Great, so we have an expert now!" - Kash.
"No, I wouldn't say that..."

By GoodGym standards, Harvey was definitely an expert - and Angela and Chris quickly rose to that level, rapidly gaining experience on the job.

The team rushed to finish a batch of stall pitches before the midday break (it was really hot, so a break was very much needed!). Perhaps feeling a little too confident, they left one corner of a rectangle unchecked. It soon became clear that the shape didn't satisfy the Pythagorean theorem - in other words, it wasn't straight. The rectangle wasn't really a rectangle at all, but an impostor quadrilateral.

The mistake was quickly corrected, and the rogue white line on the grass was sprayed over with red paint. Kash kept hold of the red spray can to mark the pitch numbers, which turned out to be a lot of fun.

"Kash, you're a tagging natural!" - Chris.

When you think about it, GoodGym offers a rare opportunity to do graffiti-style tagging without being accused of vandalism. How cool is that?

Having marked and divided the large rectangle into smaller pitches, the team moved on to six more boxes around the crafts tent, which was still being erected. The speedy GoodGym crew finished their grass graffiti before the tent was completed and just in time for a well-earned lunch break.

Great work, everyone!