For this morning's delivery to the Community Grocery, Filip joined me bang on time for his first shift. Fortunately, the team from Volunteers on Wheels wasn't there early, so he had plenty of time to do the manual lifting training.

Then the truck arrived and we rolled trolleys down the ramp. Four of us made light work of this week's goodies: carrots, tomatoes and potatoes, plus fridge stuff like gyros and pizza. Some more drinks cans, which went in the store cupboard, and a few boxes of fresh lettuce for the fridge also. We helped stack and store some surplus and then we were out the door into the sunshine.

Our third visit to St Joseph's Orchard to help the Friends group was the last for apple juicing. I arrived late from a morning session and there were already half a dozen sacks at the top of the hill and another dozen by the fence, lots of them bramleys.

I briefly got to meet some of the brave fleet of pickers who'd been there since the morning. All in, 14 people showed up over the course of the session. Then I got stuck in to picking mostly windfalls from the spartan row. Loads of lovely crisp and juicy apples scattered along the floor. Tim, John, Martha and then Sue helped us for another hour or two, going along the rows. They also have joybells, golden delicious (not doing well), and arthur w barnes - at least those are the ones I know about. The summer hasn't been kind, but the old trees know what they're doing.

Great to briefly meet Sean on his way out, and Martha, both of whom signed up through the Daniella's list for the Barnet Community Harvesters. Tim reckons they've picked nearly 2 tons of apples this year, with another 2-3 still in the orchard. Not all are ready yet, but he'd like it to not go to waste. So BCH may organise further picks through to bring apples to foodbanks and the North Finchley Community Grocery and Goodgym will do our best to help!

The Friends of Warnham Green have collected their wildflower meadow seeds from the Finchley Pollinators as part of their plan to plant 600 Mini-Meadows in Barnet. Now we need to actually clear a space. After a bit of discussion about where to put the meadow, we agreed to dig into an area of brambles we'd chopped down earlier in the year, but not dug up the roots from. The soil is relatively poor quality and the patch gets a fair bit of sun, unlike the wildflower area from earlier in the year, but the brambles had regrown at least a metre.

The plan - from the Finchley Pollinators - is to clear and weed a patch, wait a month, then dig any regrowth, then sow. So we got stuck in to create a 1m x 3m rectangle (approx) with a bit of extra clearance around for movement and to prevent overshadowing from the brambles.

With David, Marsha and myself, we made light work of it. We chopped ('minced', according to our conservationists) the brambles and nettles down to the ground, then used forks and a spade to dig up what we could. We left a bit of grass, a thistle and some dandelions around the edge of the area, and marked it with some of the fallen lime branches from earlier in the summer. And we'll be back next month to finish the job!