We at GoodGym Bath are well aware of the nurturing power of gardening and the outdoors and we certainly put in lots of practice.

One of my favourite missions is at the walled garden at Newton St Loe, which is being restored by the Grow for Life charity. It provides social and therapeutic gardening sessions for people coping with anxiety, depression or isolation. The site will eventually become a haven - as well as providing freshly-grown vegetables, flowers and herbs.

It was a treat to return to the spot and see it radically transformed from my last visit. What had been rows of lettuces of all varieties and other plants had been dug out and replaced by curvacious borders.

Grow for Life's Wayne McMaster, explained that the gardeners really wanted a place they could sit and relax and take in the atmosphere. They pointed out that regimented lines of crops do not make a relaxing environment and so the curvy flower beds were born.

And that's where GoodGym came in. Those beds need a serious amount of mulch if they are going to do their job and raise plants, veg and floral abundance.

Wayne had taken delivery of a huge lorryload of manure and our main task was to add it to the beds marked out across the site. Tanya was given the job of rescuing a host of tiny nasturtiums growing in the plots and then the team reached for rakes, spades and wheelbarrows and - with moral support from Ted the dog - did its best to move the mountain of manure.

Special thanks go to Jason - who came from GoodGym Bristol to lend a hand - and a big welcome to Jenny and Kam, making their GoodGym debut. You wouldn't realise it from the way they "dug" in.

We were also given an idea of how the garden will look when it's finished. Wayne is planning a wide variety of trees to provide fruit, shade and a windbreak for the Grow for Lifers. It was great to write the labels and perhaps we'll be back to help plant them.

We didn't quite move the mountain but we made an impressive dent in the dung. Well done Jane, Emily and the rest of the gang.

OK, so it's almost winter now and it's no longer warm anymore, but we are all grateful for blue skies and sunshine when on a GoodGym mission. This was one of those mornings, air crisp and chilly but warming under a late Autumn sun.

Five GoodGymmers arrived at one of our favourite locations, the walled garden at Newton St Loe. This Grow for Life project has been ongoing for the last couple of years and aims to be completed by 2025. Grow for Life's purpose is to provide social and therapeutic gardening sessions for people affected by low confidence, anxiety, depression or isolation.

In attendance to help was the ever enthusiastic Wayne who greeted Stephen, Jane, Natalie, Mark and Meyrick. Always prepared, he told us what he needed us to do that morning and we set to work.

A considerable amount of wood chip needed redistributing, some of it initially along the top by the main wall, let's call it a 'rampart'. If I could understand some of Wayne's grand vision, there will be trees and a path along here, and it is towards that goal that we added progress.

Elsewhere wood chip needed laying down over well worn paths throughout the garden. Whilst helping with this, barrowing and distributing, I took my eyes of the work that was going on at the top, but I believe Jane (to whom we are very grateful for continuing to organise this mission), took on the mighty bindweed.

Towards the end, inevitably, manure was involved. Horse manure to be exact. We reworked the compost piles, turning them upside down and layering them with woodchip, greens and horse manure before signing off with whatever we wanted to harvest from the garden.

A couple of us trekked over to the Walled Garden for our monthly help-out.

We tended to a few of the new beds, some of which we'd helped build last month. Things have already been growing like crazy. I knew there was a point to all that rain we’ve been having lately!

Having said that, we done a bunch of watering as well, including the epic tomatoes growing in the polytunnel.

And to finish, the old classic: turning compost.

We took away a nice haul of chard, tomatoes and beets for our help. An unexpected but welcome reward for a great morning's work.

Everything is really growing now at the Walled Garden now, and the area is really starting to shape up. But our friends at Grow For Life won’t be changed by their new found fame…

We rolled up to the the site on this reasonably fine bank holiday Monday morning - it’s a garden fresh from having gained national TV exposure on the previous Friday’s Gardeners World - only to be totally grounded in the real world, in that someone has dumped a massive pile of gravel right in the middle of the entrance gate.

This was the Big Help Out - various volunteers, not just GoodGym this time, we’re congregating to get a whole bunch of heavy maintenance tasks done.

For the first half of the session, the tasks included:

• finally taking up a whole heap of plastic matting that’s been covering the lower half of the plot since we laid it about a year ago!

• performing any weeding on this half of the site. The matting has done most of its job - only a very few super-hardy brambles were still ticking along under there

• taking some of that gravel pile and build up an entry path to the polytunnel - Meyrick suggested that in order to “mouse proof” a door frame, you want a gap under the door of less than a biro width, and we really went to town on minimising that gap to the nearest couple of millimetres!

• spreading the rest of the gravel over the site entrance area

Then we stopped for a nice tea break, where Wayne (fame hasn’t gone to his head yet) showed us the detailed plan for the site - which some of us had had a sneak preview on the telly on Friday. Before back to work for:

• chopping and prepping a bunch of nettles to make a “nitrogen bomb” to start off a new 18-day compost heap (as seen on TV)

• constructing some new planting beds on the nearly uncovered lower site. Involved lots of wheelbarrowing, compost, and some of the cardboard we’d put to one side a few months back

• putting bark chips around the new beds

All in all a lovely morning in this newly famous Newton-St-Loe garden.

This morning we were back at the walled garden in Newton St. Loe, a favourite location for us at GoodGym Bath, helping the guys at Grow for Life develop their amazing space which is used to help transform lives through therapeutic horticulture. Following a brief from the all-knowing Wayne detailing the purpose of the day's task which was to re-landscape the narrow alleyway behind the shed and along the wall, we got to work.

Whilst Jane and I began removing nasty thistles and bindweed from the walls and surrounding area, Mark was responsible for dismantling the wooden beams that were bordering the shed's concrete foundations. These reclaimed wooden beams will go on to be used for raised plant beds or compost containers in the future.

Once this had been completed, we got some tarpaulin down and were joined by Stephen who had braved the brutal cycle up the hill, and we proceeded to shovel bucket after bucket of gravel into buckets which, following plenty of hard work and heavy lifting, we distributed and compacted down to produce a new pathway, the main purpose of which being to allow the shed's foundations to be expanded so that it is more accessible for wheelchair users.

We certainly put the "gym" into GoodGym this morning and had a great time on one of the many wonderful projects that we always get involved with in the walled garden. We'll be back on Monday 8th May as part of the Big Help Out so come along and get stuck in!

Today, we joined a bigger group from Grow For Life, to take part in a charcoal party!

Wooden pallets do a sterling job of work at the walled garden: pinning things down; keeping things dry by keeping them off the ground; helping keep things dry by pinning them under tarpaulins; making makeshift tables; all sorts! We seem to spend a lot of time moving pallets around the site, and have even learned special techniques for doing so! They've become like familiar old friends in their time.

But today, for some of our friends, their time has come to an end.

Wayne has introduced us to the fire pit on site before. A huge hole in the ground, looming menacingly next to the polytunnel, like a makeshift hot-tub where maybe Wayne chillaxes with a prosecco of an evening after a heavy day's work. Today, its time was just coming into being...

Our task was basically breaking up pallets. Sawing, crowbar-ing, whatever it takes-ing to break the pallets into nice neat wood blocks which Wayne was carefully laying into the now aflame fire pit.

Charcoal making is the name of the game. By carefully controlling the combustion process, rather than burning away to nothing, our pallet wood will become charcoal. Which will then be used as part of the growing cycle.

As a reward, we finished up with tea and bacon butties (vegetarian option was also available).

Wayne will still be on site for much of the day, long after we’ve left, carefully layering up his pallet cuttings, and making heaps of charcoal. Before chillaxing into that prosecco as the sun sets over Newton-St-Loe.... 🥂

Woo-hoo!

Big up to Ruth, celebrating a 50th Goodgym good-deed today! 🥳

Welcome

And a warm welcome to GoodGym newcomer Jean.

Also welcome back to Katherine, doing a first actual job of GoodGym work after coming along to last week's slightly abortive effort at hedge laying. Glad that didn’t put you off!