It was great to put up Old Spike Peckham and welcome back Sophie who has been in Australia for the past few months. It was also good to see Lucy who hadn't been around these past few weeks. As Maria, Isaac, Rosalind, Daryl, Paulin came in, they discussed about the precious six inches of top soil that is the life blood of humanity. Some deep stuff and quite fitting as our ice breaker snap poll had to do with Earth Day: if you had to go with one policy: clean the ocean of plastics, stop deforestation or embrace cleaner and sustainable energy, which one would you go for? As it hit 18:45, Sam got on with his usual speech and asked for his ice breaker question, he asked which charity people have run or would run for if they did the London Marathon?

In the snap-poll, most want to embrace cleaner and sustainable energy, a couple said clean the ocean and no one went for deforestation. For the marathon question, we had a variety of charities including GoodGym.

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Bath time

Opting for a warm up in the alleyway due to the route taking us out that way, Sam had to do a quick warm-up as the ice-breaker question took too long. With Maria backmarking, off the group went through the backstreets of Peckham/East Dulwich to arrive at East Dulwich station, through the park and the backroute to get to Sunray Avenue near North Dulwich. They had to push and run up the hill for the final part to make it to Denmark Hill Community Garden. Here they met Rose, her partner, Richard just arrived and shortly afterwards so too did Jo and Phil. After a quick introduction, Rose outlined the two main tasks. Firstly, to move three bathtubs out of the way to make space and room for the second task. The second task was to dig a trench a spade deep and a forearm wide.

We split into teams with the girls diving into moving the bath tubs as a group. Paulin, Sophie, Lucy and Rosalind took on the first bath tub finding it somewhat easier than it looked as these bathtubs were filled with soil. The others soon followed to move tub two and three, but Louise, Maria and Jo picked up the dutch hoe and shovels to make a start on the trench. With limited tools, each person took it in turn to help out dig this trench as we soon realised it would be harder than we thought as we couldn't dig deeper than 20 centimetres before encounting gravel and brick. We realised with 10 minutes left that we could only prepare as much as we could and opted to come back next Wednesday - splitting the group with one half going to Thorlands Gardens in Camberwell and the other coming back here.

All was not lost as we had the first HIIT session with Louise and Jo being the only ones joining in and right at the end, we were treated to fresh mint tea, which was a blessing as the night took a cold turn after such a promising sunny start.

After sipping down a warm cuppa, we ran down the hill down to Old Spike in no time and made it back for 20:30.

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Thank You to all the GG-ers

A personal thanks from me to all those who came out last night! Rose was really pleased that we made a start and happy that we can come back next Wednesday to finish the job. Thank you to Maria and Paulin for backmarking.

With her phone now loud and clear, it was easy to get Miss S's shopping list from her in advance of today's visit to Surrey Quays and we hoped everything she asked for could be found. Miss S has clearly been following the news as, in light of Tesco reporting bumper profits last week, she was really hoping some of the prices of her favourite goods may have come down...

The shopping part was straightforward enough, but as I wandered along the leafy paths of the ecological park and voted (in my mind at least) Miss S's shopping walk home as definitely in the top 3 most scenic of all time, I came face to face with a brazen fox - after a brief Mexican standoff where we eyed each other for quite some time, said fox dashed into the undergrowth to find its next meal, and I continued on my merry way to drop off Miss S's treasure at her front door.

A different Saturday task at Thorlands as Jo, Maria, Richard and Sam met up Simon and the Thorlands gang to flyer the estate for a community compost workshop on Saturday 4th of May.

Armed with a load of flyers they systematically tackled each estate block in pairs or solo with Simon having the key to open each block door.

Towards the end of the session, Louise showed up to assist in flyering an area as we managed to cover the whole area in an hour and a half. Next Saturday, we will be back to normal arrangements - weeding and woodchipping.

On a Monday afternoon, two GoodGymers: Ally and Anna joined regular volunteers at Borough Food Co-operative for a session of sorting and stacking. It was Ally's first time at BFC and using GoodGym as a portal to do good. We helped to unload fruit and vegetable deliveries into crates ready for shoppers to collect when they open their doors tomorrow. We then packed up and labelled bags of sausage rolls and pasties. What a friendly and well-run place!

On a beautiful morning, Paulin, Maria and Anna met the other parkrun volunteers to help put the weekly run on.

Paulin and Anna encouraged the children with cheers and high fives along the initial stretch of the course. Maria funnelled them over the line at the end.

Hopefully a lot of children were able let off some steam before heading back to school on Monday.

Sam and I tackled Miss L’s garden (back and front) for 1h30’ on this lovely, sunny Saturday.

The difference in the back garden is pretty dramatic, as it was overgrown with weeds and grass everywhere. One more session should do it.

We also continued removing the brambles that have closed up the side entrance (no pictures i’m afraid) with our remaining time once we were finished at the back.