Four creative goodgymers met at the new Green Skills library in Maidenhead to give some new life to old baubles. Sarah and Angela cut up Christmas fabrics which had all been donated whilst Chris P and Chris D set about sticking them onto the baubles. After much patience and filling in gaps and generous amounts of glue many new and unique baubles appeared! A lovely way to spend a chilly afternoon!

The Friends of Oaken Grove Park are creating a Wildlife pond in the Nicholas Winton Garden. GoodGymmers have spent many happy (and smelly!) sessions helping out in the past, so we jumped at the chance to help them create a wildlife habitat. The first job was to shovel the shingle which had been put in the empty pond, so that it formed a good slope up to the edge of the pond. Then we had a mountainous (8 tonnes) of topsoil that need to be shovelled into barrows and tipped into the pond. This then had to be raked to cover the shingle. Christine and Rowena were champion rakers and treaders, while Sol and Sheila shovelled their hearts out We all had a really good workout, and will probably feel the effects tomorrow morning! Together with 4 other volunteers we managed to transfer the whole of the topsoil mountain to the pond area - we completed in a morning a task that was predicted to take 2 days! Taskowner Dave was delighted with what had been achieved. Great work by everyone, and welcome to Rowena to her first GoodGym mission - we hope to see you again soon

Four GoodGymmers joined other volunteers at Ray Mill Island for a spot of dry hedge building. Mick was chief engineer and stake-driver, Christine cut branches to size, whilst Anne-Laure and Sheila sorted the area around the compost bins that had become a bit of a dumping ground. Once the supporting stakes were in, the area in between could be packed with branches to the agreed height, with the aid of our boots, and hey presto, a dry hedge was born. It was much-admired by passers-by, and it has to be said, by ourselves too. Not bad for an afternoon's work