A bit of a warm one (something of a habit this year) meant, once again, everyone joined the walking group across the city to Brunswick Cemetery for the removal (destruction) of the beautiful Jerusalem Sage and Acanthus Mollis before they spread their seeds and take over even ore of the gardens - anything that's described as a "vigorous" plant and, in this case, also "robust" make for good planting and robust, vigorous GoodGym-style weeding!

i don't think we've ever had a pile of green waste that's taller than our GoodGymmers, but we have now! We know we'll have a short-lived feeling of being in more control of the wildness in the Cemetery for a couple of weeks after all that effort, and rewarded ourselves with the July edition of GoodGym Eats at Rudy's ridiculously speedy pizza place - great food, lovely cocktail-style soft drinks with slightly furry fruit plus the usual, weird, GG Bristol chat. With air con. Perfect.

Oops

Lots more tidying so paths are clearer and weed seeds less able to spread around

Cooler weather and the Battle of the Sages was on! The first bed to be tackled, the Jerusalem Sage grows in abundance in the Cemetery Gardens, treated as a weed to try to control the amount of the plant to only those areas where it's wanted.

The beautiful yellow UFO flowers have given way to the ominously rattling seedheads, so it's time for them to go! Much chopping, as well as sticky bud and grass seed gathering plus a bonus bindweed bagging, the flower bed was soon looking thoroughly trampled and the pile of green waste for the gardeners to collect was HUGE!

it was warm but we managed to get two ends of a path to join up and look more like a path again - success!

Fantastic sunshine greeted 11 GoodGymmers who were relieved it had stopped raining. It was great to meet Alice, visiting us from London Town and Josh joining for his very first GoodGym task having been attracted to the red t-shirt gang at a local event. Rasa and Matty also joined us for a second time and our cemetery gardens specialist Ieva was back, too. Great to see you all!

Brunswick Cemetery was looking glorious in the evening sun and the recent heat and rain have helped everything grow fast - especially the weeds! reclaiming the paths from the greenery was the main plan, catching as many of the weeds before they scatter their seeds and create next year's weeding.

Lots of chatter and plant identification (guesswork), the park was a-buzz with GoodGymmers and insects getting their fix. Bag after bag of green waste was piled up for the Council to collect along with armfuls of bigger/spikier weeds.

It was soon time for the random pointing end-of-task photo as we left the park even more beautiful than weed (see what I did there?) found it.

Back to Workout to sit by the water with a pot of tea and taste-testing the chocolate protein cakes, or chocolate not-do-much protein cakes - great evening everyone.