Goodgym Southampton is one year old today!! 🎉🎂

To celebrate we went to city farm with an army of goodgymers ready and eager to help with whatever task Tom may have had in mind for us. We were pretty sure it was going to be more goat mountain shenanigans but were shocked when farm volunteer Danni mentioned that this evening we would be helping put all the animals to bed and meeting them all by means of celebration and thankyou.

We were thoroughly spoilt - getting to feed the sheep and goats, getting walked by the new pygmy boys, putting the chickens and ducks to bed and meeting all the reptiles from the blue tongued skink to the gecko and giant african land snail.

After our tour of the farm we were kindly given use of the community room to celebrate our birthday with cake and drinks kindly supplied by Energise Me and Ellie.

We were also delighted to see Paul and Simon back with us after last weeks litter pick and to welcome Aimee for her first goodgym task.

Its been an incredible year with 157 tasks(!!!). Heres to seeing what year two brings!

We were back at Southampton City Farm this evening helping to build and solidify Goat Mountain even more.

When we arrived we found the mountain had been given more height with some extra pallets which will require covering on top, this meant that at points we were having to charge up goat mountain with our very heavy wheelbarrows full of mud!

It was a true workout this evening. Wilson was champion wheelbarrow filler and was super hard core digging and filling the barrows. Although we were smaller in numbers this evening we achieved an awful lot and Tom the farm manager was shocked when he realised how much we had done. We were accompanied as ever by a cracking set of tunes and the help of the farms volunteer team. This time Abby beloved green big baz was replaced by big bertha the big pink wheelbarrow who Lauren developed a bond with. Amanda did an excellent job filling and transporting and Sarah dug up and uncovered an egg at the dig site! Debates are ongoing as to whether it was a fox or crow that buried it. We even got rabbit cuddles this evening, the perfect reward for goat mountaining.

We are back to hopefully complete this task with two further sessions in march as the goats are incoming!

Back to city farm this evening to start our assault on building the much talked goat mountain 🐐 When we arrived we saw a fresh batch of woodchip in the carpark and were wondering whether Tom had visions of this being shifted again instead. However we were all very swiftly put to work, digging up and leveling an area of ground the farm are going to build a classroom on and taking the wheelbarrows full of mud to cover the 'mountain' which was a very large raised area of twigs that needed covering.

It became very apparent why Tom wants this split over multiple sessions as the area is so large. Abby did a particularly good job commandeering the largest and greenest of the wheelbarrows (now known forever more affectionately as Big Baz).

We all agreed this was a definite workout and were pleasantly surprised to see the mountain start to take shape near the end of the session.

We look forward to returning in two weeks time to hopefully help conquer more of goat mountain 🏔️

Our task this evening was to clean bricks! It was fun from the start with Richard demonstrating how clean we needed to clean the bricks, (I'm sure he had picked an easy one!) Some important things to note were how to clean the "P" on a brick and how to decide if a dink was just a dink!

Ellie and Hannah got to work by collecting the bricks from the big pile and wheelbarrowing them up to the two cleaning stations

Judy, Val, Sarah, Amanda and Wilson were armed with tools at their cleaning tables, ready to scrape and remove mortar and paint from the bricks. (Not as easy as Richard made it look)

We welcomed a new volunteer Leszek to the task this evening, after helping with a task on Sunday it was great to see him join us for our Monday session. Together with Janet and Helen he helped in the shop to dismantle parts of the counter and treat some of the wooden worktop.

Once the work in the shop was complete the whole team got stuck into brick cleaning.

The time whizzed by and the hour passed quickly. We managed to clean 58 bricks!

Once cleaned up, used bricks have a monetary value of 60p each, the farm will sell the bricks to a local reclamation company.

We dink we only made a slight dink in the pile of bricks so we will be back soon for a Saturday session to do some more!