☀ 26 excellent GoodGymmers gathered for our third and final bank holiday group run of the month. And a lovely sunny evening it was too.

👋 We were thrilled to welcome Michaela for her first group run, and to see Louise who’s visiting up from London.

🦸‍♂ Sadly, I completely forgot to bring the cape for Ed’s very impressive 300th good deed so that glorious moment/photo op is yet to come. Well done though 👍

🥔 We named, numbered and warmed up with a slightly ad hoc question (which fit with my slightly disorganised mind this evening). In honour of it being whitsun weekend, we offered our favourite comedian and/or potato dishes. There were some very reputable comedians cited but personally, it also just reminded me how many great ways there are you serve potatoes (dauphinois, hash browns, croquettes), which in turn made me pretty hungry.

🍎 Ed led the run to Holgate Community Orchard where we marvelled in the progress that’s been made in the 18-ish months that we’ve been coming here. The first part of the patch is blooming with wildflowers so we got stuck into the second. One job there was to lop nettles, dig brambles and remove bindweed. Meanwhile, another group got stuck in removing stones from a stony patch.

🧲 A third group were on random metal object extraction duties. Door handles/hinges and horseshoes were among their finds, with some impressive digging to get them out. More natural finds were a potato plant by Charlotte (which Helen thinks must have been there for decades) and a frog by Bernie. We can’t wait to see how this part of the orchard turns out and we’re particularly excited to hear more about the bee initiatives there 🐝

🗻 Some excellent work was done during our time there tonight, before we headed to Windmill Rise for some hill reps. We did these in pairs and included a warm up and cool down plus three higher intensity reps in the middle.

🍻 With that, it was time to head back to base and home/on to the pub.

🌺 We’ve got a few sessions coming up this week, including this one at North Street Gardens on Wednesday evening with Barbara so do sign up and join us if you can.

Claire, Cara and I headed back to Holgate Community Orchard and Apiary to continue with clearing the Apiary area. Today the priority was breaking up a pile of dried offcut branches before the bindweed took over. We added about 8 barrows of them to the compost. Our visit coincided with a plant swap and cake allotment event so we were brought some delicious millionaires shortbread while we worked and offered some plants at the end.