It had been a while since we visited the Welcome to Luton gravel sign, it had got a bit patchy with weeds and looking sad so we spent our evening running up the hill to get to it. Pulled out the weeds, tidied the stones back into their right places and then enjoyed a quick run back down the hill.

Another successful litter pick in People's Park, teaming up with the Friends group to make a total of 11 people helping to pick 10 general bags of rubbish, 8 bags of recycling, discarded scooters 🛴🛴, fencing and pillows out of the park.

It was also the first session for Patrick so well done and welcome to the team!

5 Luton Goodgymers joined the Friends of Leagrave Park for their monthly litterpick. Fighting through the soggy weather the volunterrs collected 12 bags of rubbish in total. Fantastic to job done by one and all. Great to welcome Pelumi to his first task. Well done everyone, great job

It was the final task of a series trying to clear all the invasive Himalayan Balsam plants from the Lewsey Brook, one of the tributaries of the River Lea. Teaming up with Jen from TCV and some of Luton's regular conservation volunteers.

It was also the first task for Niamh joining us after seeing the session on Facebook and Petros returning for his second session.

With the continued drought conditions the brook was bone dry so we were able to climb in without getting wet and hunt for the balsam plants. They got pulled up, roots snapped off and left to dry out on the brook side. This section of the brook was thankfully quite light on the balsam so we got it all done in a couple of hours and was able to collect lots of litter as well and take a walk back upstream to double-check the areas we'd done in previous weeks.

This session completed the length of the brook, a whole kilometer! We'll see what pops up next year but we've prevented loads of new seeds from being laid so hopefully there will substantially less to do next year!

It was Gill's turn to lead our small group run tonight, and after a quick warm up we headed off along New Bedford Road to Cowslip Meadow. The mention if Golden Rid by Dave had lead some if us into a false sense if security, as our usual Golden Rod patch is not too far out of town. So finding out that we would be running twice as far was a bit of a surprise. But the temperature had cooked and it was a lively evening to be running. On arrival at the What Three Words location we couldn't soot any if the dreaded weed and had just about resigned ourself to a fruitless mission when the combination of Ella's eagle eyes and Gill's first encounter with Google Lens reassured us that we had found our target. The ground was either relatively soft, or our pulling power was in max strength as pulling out this invasive pest was relatively simple and we had several piles to take back to the gates. The run back was even more enjoyable, with the slope now in our favour, and the sun dipping down further, and it was good to know we'd got just over 7km under our belts too.

We had a good team out this morning to support the Friends of People's Park with their monthly litter pick, and it was lovely to welcome Petros Teklayi for his first ever GoodGym task. He teamed up with Lee and they were soon headed off into the trees to locate rubbish and recycling. Gill managed to grab the most interesting find of the day - a rather salubrious sports car , and although it was missing two wheels Lucie took a shine to it, and decided this was her new car! She and Dani headed off across the meadow, and Gill and Anthony went through the orchard and up and over towards Pope's meadow. Rachel joined with the Friends to keep things clean near the park area. We left the park looking neat and tidy and ready to welcome weekend visitors. Well done team. We hope that Petros has enjoyed his first foray into GoodGym and that he'll join us in many more missions.