Everything is really growing now at the Walled Garden now, and the area is really starting to shape up. But our friends at Grow For Life won’t be changed by their new found fame…

We rolled up to the the site on this reasonably fine bank holiday Monday morning - it’s a garden fresh from having gained national TV exposure on the previous Friday’s Gardeners World - only to be totally grounded in the real world, in that someone has dumped a massive pile of gravel right in the middle of the entrance gate.

This was the Big Help Out - various volunteers, not just GoodGym this time, we’re congregating to get a whole bunch of heavy maintenance tasks done.

For the first half of the session, the tasks included:

• finally taking up a whole heap of plastic matting that’s been covering the lower half of the plot since we laid it about a year ago!

• performing any weeding on this half of the site. The matting has done most of its job - only a very few super-hardy brambles were still ticking along under there

• taking some of that gravel pile and build up an entry path to the polytunnel - Meyrick suggested that in order to “mouse proof” a door frame, you want a gap under the door of less than a biro width, and we really went to town on minimising that gap to the nearest couple of millimetres!

• spreading the rest of the gravel over the site entrance area

Then we stopped for a nice tea break, where Wayne (fame hasn’t gone to his head yet) showed us the detailed plan for the site - which some of us had had a sneak preview on the telly on Friday. Before back to work for:

• chopping and prepping a bunch of nettles to make a “nitrogen bomb” to start off a new 18-day compost heap (as seen on TV)

• constructing some new planting beds on the nearly uncovered lower site. Involved lots of wheelbarrowing, compost, and some of the cardboard we’d put to one side a few months back

• putting bark chips around the new beds

All in all a lovely morning in this newly famous Newton-St-Loe garden.

Come and help prepare a wildflower meadow they said… it sounds idyllic we thought… 😀

Four intrepid GoodGymers braved the wet weather for this group run up at Bath City Farm.

Our host Joe tooled us up, and took us down to an area on the lower end of the steep field, just above Twerton Park football ground.

An area of high brambles used to live here, but has recently been cut back. As part of an ongoing schedule of work to prep the site for the wildflowers, our job was to rake up the bramble cuttings. Which it turns out it’s actually a much harder job than it looks. Especially since once you’ve raked it up, what’s left is fairly bare mud which in this rain, on that slope, becomes really slippery to walk on.

Joe popped off to get some extra tools for the second part of the task - a drag bag and one of our old favourites - a mattock 😍

Having raked the dead brambles into piles, an even muddier, slippier, exhausting task involved hauling them onto the drag bag and dragging said bag up to the top of the field to get the cuttings out of the way.

A few of the hardier brambles were still attached to the ground - hence the mattock.

All in all this was one of the toughest GoodGym tasks any of us has undertaken. We didn’t even get to cuddle any baby goats this time!!

I’m sure the wildflower meadow will look lovely in due course though… 🤗