It was our first session of the season with Friends Of Everton Park. John had given us a slightly different venue and task for the first session. The Community Gardens is a hidden haven which is just full of plants. Its an amazing place that feels quite special when you walk in - not least as you know the hard work put in from all the regular people that tend this space week in week out.

The garden uses large raised beds which have been built using large thick substantial wooden planks however as happens the wood is starting to show its age and had started to rot in places.

Our task was to dismantle the raised bed - barrow the soil to the main soil heap and take apart the wooden frame being careful of the large nails that held them together- leaving the space flattened ready to be rebuilt.

As we were so many we had an over flow team working on a second raised bed and of course some friendly competition ensued. Lets just say the first team had more people more wheelbarrows and Jake who was running back and forth with the barrows and the second team had less people less wheelbarrows and a certain report writer who is renowned for chatting a lot.....

Our hour up and we had almost completed two raised beds - or should that be depleted? It was a really satisfying task great fun and company as always and lovely to be back in Everton again. Welcome to Tasha on her first task - look forward to seeing you again.

It was an early start for a group of GoodGymmers this fine Sunday morning as we came together to set up the Otterspool prom water station for the Liverpool half marathon. Three GoodGym members were taking part, Vikky, Roz and Emma, while Sallyann was running the Bath half marathon the same day. We were looking forward to cheering on our friends along with the rest of the runners, and got going setting up our tables either side of the route. As we prepared by unpacking crates of water bottles from a shipping container, opening the bottles and screwing the tops back on so they were ready to hand out, there was a growing sense of anticipation as we waited to see the first runners pass by. Not many of the leading runners wanted water, leading to the teams on each side of the path competing to hand out water to those who did and jokingly boasting about our bottle tallies. This was soon forgotten as we began to get steadily busier and were very quickly deluged with runners as the main body of the race passed by. Even though our stock of prepared bottles filled three trestle tables, it vanished very quickly and everyone was working flat out either unpacking bottles or handing them out. We were so overwhelmed that eventually we had to give up unscrewing them, something that has never happened before in our time running the water station for this race - there were 9 thousand runners this year, an increase of about 2 thousand on previous years, and it really made a difference! Despite how intense it was we kept up a cheer for all the athletes as they passed, and when we spotted Roz, Emma and Vikky we made sure to shout extra loudly for them. As the race drew to a close we turned our attention to our next big task - collecting up all the bottles the runners had thrown behind them. Charmaine, who happened to be passing by on a walk, got stuck in to help which was amazing, and even signed up as a GoodGym member later that day - a big thank you, Charmaine! With the extra help we powered through the clean-up and collected a staggering 52 rubbish sacks full of plastic bottles. We were all quite sobered to see the scale of plastic waste and are really hoping to see a more sustainable solution for next year's run. As for this year though, it was hard work but good fun and made enjoyable by the camaraderie and conversation of the GoodGym team - huge thanks and kudos to everyone!

Despite some rather miserable spring weather in Liverpool, 8 dedicated goodgymmers met for our usually Monday night task.

After a quick, 2 mile run, we met lark lane neighbourhood association and headed off down the lane to clear up any and all discarded litter!

We were all quite pleasantly surprised by how clean it appeared and felt like we had to really search for the litter. This meant it was all the more satisfying when we realised we had gathered 7 full bags!

Strangest find goes to Jowho found a fork in the road! (how poetic)

Well done everyone it was clear to see the impact we had!

We, six good-gymers started on a sunny Saturday morning, meeting Kate from friends of festival gardens in the Japanese garden in Liverpool festival gardens near St Michael’s.

Some of us walked, one cycled and some enthusiastically came after their park runs!

Well the plan was to uncover hidden Japanese garden features- a hill, a wall and actual plants- which was all covered in bramble and ivy!

Interestingly the hill is Tsukiyama, Tsukiyama refers to the creation of man-made hills, and is a classic type of Japanese garden that embodies a miniature of natural scenery.

So we set to attacking the bramble carpet! A few hours later we had found the wall and could see the little hill, and we had made our own mounds of bramble -not sure if a new spiky feature is considered very Japanese gardeni though , anyway a Togatta - yama, please please nobody who knows or is Japanese read this!