Yesterday afternoon the sky cleared just on time to provide us with good conditions for our autumnal gardening session at Manor Paddock, one of the senior residential housings that we served in Brighton & Hove. As usual, resident Luc welcomed us well prepared and massively thankful for the GoodGym superpower offered – without which the job would take him ages to do!

Several were the tasks needed, all done within less than an hour at the light of our powerful (more or less) headtorches! Planting bulbs, reshaping lavender bushes, weeding scrubs, collecting foliage, pruning buddleias and taking care of tomatoes plants’ beds.

Whom's running, whom's easy pacing because a doggy knee or cycling because of a stiff back pain (me, sigh!) … all we came and went off in full action!

Something to add to my gardening culture: Buddleia, also known as butterfly bush, is a perennial, semi-evergreen plant. Once it has flowered, it only loses its foliage for a short period of the year. The flowers of a buddleia generally appear from July to October. It's a robust shrub but can quickly become untidy if not pruned, with the flowers appearing so high that only the butterflies can enjoy them. Annual pruning keeps it in shape and helps produce more flowers, lower down.

Let’s see the results of our “pitch-perfect” buddleia pruning and lavender shaping next spring, shall we? 😊

GoodGym anti-tagging missions are like a “Tug of War” between the residents re-imaging their city without graffiti on the street walls and the artists (or sort of) making them.

Brighton GoodGym was in Hanover and Elm Grove ward this Tuesday to tackle street graffiti, again!

Armed with brushes and rolls, magnolia and brilliant white paints, we tackled unwanted graffiti in Melbourne Street and Pevensey Road, bringing lots of satisfaction to us all and especially to a local resident who was very pleased and thankful offering us tea and biscuits. An invite to return here, as we probably will.

But for now, job done. NOW WOW!

Graffiti tagging is one of the engagement theme of Re-Imaging Brighton & Hove to shape the future of our city together. This is a Brighton & Hove council initiative engaging all, especially young people, to share experiences, hear ideas and turn ideas into action to help deliver the Council Strategy Plan for 2023 to 2027. The first appointment is on 21st November, at 6pm at the BMECP (Black and Minority Ethnic Community Partnership) Centre.

B'fest is the Brighton Youth Arts Festival, run for and by young people.

B’fest is ON this week with a jam-packed programme of gigs, exhibitions, workshops, dance, theatre, skate and so much more bringing together 100+ young people from across southeast to the Brighton Youth Centre.

Here we were this Tuesday again to help serving pizzas, facilitating (playing, actually 😊) games at the “Gaming Retro-bution” taking over with Retro Gaming consoles galore and making personalised badges and stickers with our favourite designs and logos: GoodGym, of course, but not only.

We enjoyed our time, and it was a blast! We can now proudly wear our donated B’Fest Tshirts and stand ready to offer our superpower once again in the near future, when the Brighton Youth Centre will need to move to other premises.