A beautiful early summer evening to keep fit by doing good. We started at the Tap with a warm welcome to Mazin for the first time, and a lot of celebratory chat after Lucy completed the London Marathon yesterday 😍

Chatting away, we headed to Richmond CVS to collect this evening's leaflets before dividing up to cover the roads on the way up to Kew. Lovely doorways, demon letterboxes and evening sun kept us company as the wedge of leaflets receeded until it was time for us to call it a night and head off in our own directions!

We were back at the Vine Road recreation ground in Barnes on a lovely Saturday morning, to lend some help to Christine and team at the Barnes Common Community Growing Project.

The Community Growing Project is a space where people of all ages and abilities come together to grow food. By growing, sowing and learning together, they aim to reduce social isolation, build wellbeing and strengthen community cohesion.

There were several tasks to do, including weeding the beds in the main polytunnel and composting the weeds, moving tables and chairs to make way for an easier walkway through the garden, and tackling the weeds under the vine growing on the perimeter fence.

Everyone got stuck in, enjoying the weather and making a big difference. We finished up in time to have a nice coffee together - half price for volunteers!

Hope to be back helping the team again soon.

Adam, Chris, JP and Sam turned out for Good Gym’s monthly Richmond Furniture Scheme visit on this sunny Easter weekend.

Supplied with Hoes, spade and choppers we were instructed to tidy up the over growing weeds in the front yard and move the garden furniture that needed disposing of.

Chris and JP both proved dab hands with the hoes, while Sam used his skills with the spade and Adam was able to chop back much of the overgrowing greenery.

All this added up to a job well done!

...midges.

A beautiful April evening, except for the swarms of midges, for GoodGym Richmond’s second Monday of the month Group Run task at our sponsored plots in Buccleuch Gardens, Richmond.

But I guess, particularly as this was a WWF/GoodGym ‘Workout for Nature’, we should embrace the midges and the less glamorous animals, insects and wildlife that are all part of the broad biodiversity and healthy ecosystem that we are trying encourage by are gardening work.

So let’s hear it for midges Chironomidae (Diptera): their larvae and pupae are important food for fish and other aquatic organisms such as newts. And the flying midges in their adult stage are eaten by fish, insectivorous birds, bats and flying predatory insects.

Enough of midges and onto our heroic humans Anita, Chris, Jade, Lucy and Suze.

Anita, Chris, Jade and Suze. set about sweeping, weeding and litter picking around all the benches and in the borders. Our weeding focused on weeding out unwanted plants such as ivy and also three-cornered leek (Allium triquetrum) which looks very pretty, like a white bluebell, but is actually a real thug, a non-native invasive plant listed on Schedule 9 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act (making it an offence to introduce the plant to the wild in the UK).

Meanwhile Lucy, who had completed 16km of her London marathon training to get to the task, still had the tenacity to prick-out and pot-up a whole tray of salvia ‘blue admiral’ seedlings, before she headed off into the dusk to clock a further 3km.

Fun times helping out this great charity.

A very warm welcome to Mamoud who joined Anita for Task preparation for the Richmond GoodGym second monday Group run task in the evening.

As well as walking through Buccleuch Gardens assessing the most urgent gardening tasks required across our sponsored plots , we also unloaded compost and salvia seedlings and took them down to the Arcade, then went down to the river to wash out plant plots and trays in the river, preparation for pricking out and growing on the salvia.