Probably the best organised skip filling ever! Since the project was completed a couple of years ago, RUSS have accumulated a lot of rubbish that they needed to get rid via a skip. They also needed people who skip and do heavy lifting, there was only one team who could help - GoodGym Lewisham!

First, in went a large quantity of unusable wood. Then, what seemed like, several thousand plastic plant pots were put into columns. Some people - Oli and Steve, excelled at this, some people have poor at spatial relationships and were less good - yes that’s you Paul. The flower pots were placed at the bottom and then the skip and a couple of dozen bags of builders’ rubble more or less filled it.

Meanwhile, Lindsay and Julian bagged up copious quantities of well rotted compost.

Tea and biscuits wrapped things up at the end of an excellent evening.

RUSS is a volunteer-led Community Land Trust dedicated to providing homes that remain affordable in perpetuity. There is more about them here. https://www.theruss.org

On Monday we headed to St Mary's Church to help with various tasks, we were due to be inside the church but the bell ringers and brass band were practicing which meant we were outside tackling the mountain of woodchip whilst being serenaded by the bell ringers.

As well as shifting the woodchip, part of the group also tackling the watering of the plants and filling up the pond with rain water.

The woodchip pile was looking a bit lower than when we started and the graves had a generous amount of woochip around them. It was good to see the plants that we planted on our last visit have survived the lack of rain and looked like they were thriving!

We were then spoilt by St Mary's who always provide us with cups of tea and cakes and then it was time for the brass band to serenade us!

Next week is another shorter run to RUSS!

We had a busy night in store at the Albany, as while the lovely gardener there was away, they'd sent a wonderful video showing all the things that they'd like us to in preparation for a summer jamboree!

We needed to make sure their party went to plan! First timer Michael quickly got to work with several other moving a large pile of paving slabs to the side of the building. There was plenty of choice with the tasks with moving woodchip to a path, moving a large compost bin, along with the regular task there - litter picking. Everything was done plus a bit of pruning along the newly chipped path.

We had a lovely evening and hope to see Michael again soon! We were able to pose by the sunflowers, we had cleared and prepared the ground for them earlier in the year.

Something we discovered after the session was that the visit to the Albany completed an incredible 100 month streak of group sessions for the amazing Vic (pictured second left on the group photo).

The task for this week was straightforward in what we needed to do but logistically a little more challenging as we needed to spread out in groups across the surrounding area of Glass Mill.

Our task was to complete the health checks of the street trees for living that have been planted in the past couple of years. Armed with a form to submit and for some a device to measure tree trunks whether that being an actual tape measure or a 19cm hand, and a map of what trees we needed to tick off.

We managed to health check over 70 trees which is amazing work! The team at street trees for living are very grateful of our efforts!!

Congratulations to Paul for achieving the dizzy heights of 1,000 good deeds. We look forward to seeing you sporting your 1,000 tshirt soon!