I helped Mr S and his wife deal with a wisteria plant that had grown out of control. At first, I thought the job was to trim it into a reasonable shape. But as the stems were cut back, a different idea started taking shape in Mrs S's mind.

"Do you know someone who could take out this tree?" - Mrs S.
"So you don't want to keep it at all?" - Kash.
"I hate it. It took me three days to cut it back last time."
"Do you have a saw?"

The saw was available indeed. So was the ladder. I changed tactics, aiming to remove the tree. Sawing off the main stems would take me a few minutes, but Mrs S rightly raised concerns about the neighbours' garden.

"This is our tree, but it grows on the other side of the wall too. What if it falls on the neighbours' plots? They are growing veggies there."

The wisteria was extremely tangled, and there was no way I could just cut down the tree and hope everything would fall on Mr S's side. Half of the tree's crown grew on the neighbours' side, and half of those branches had made their way there through the ornamental holes in the wall.

I had to hop onto the ladder and work my way down from the top of the tree, making sure no cuttings ended up in the neighbours' garden — either ones cut that day or ones that might fall later from a branch I'd cut low and left to wither. From that height, I spotted that the neighbours across the wall must have embraced their part of the wisteria and hung a couple of lights or charms on its branches.

With all those discoveries, Mrs S and I decided against rushing to saw the tree down that day and instead collected the cuttings into five bags. We carried them to the front of the house and emptied them into a green bin. Even with me stamping down the green waste, there was no way it would all fit in the bin. Luckily, a neighbour from across the road rushed over to offer Mrs S some space in his wheelie bin.

No wonder Mrs S makes her neighbours such great allies!

"Every session is different" is a GoodGym Ealing mantra, even for the same organisation. The changing seasons mean our partners' needs change too. To paraphrase someone or other famous who may have volunteered at Care4Calais with us:

"GoodGym is like a bag of donations. You never know what you're gonna get."

A month since our futile attempts to try and untangle overgrown tomato plants at Feeding Ealing, today we were doing something quite different. Preparing the raised beds for new planting and future crops. A big welcome to Emily, who joined us for her first GoodGym task, walking with the group from Horsenden Farm 🥳🎉. Give her a cheer! 📣

Emily and the others must've wondered what they'd let themselves in for when our task owner, Joseph, asked "are you ready for some graft?". He then led us to a huge pile of manure. From there, we were shown the raised beds that needed to be refreshed before new planting started.

"Where did that [big pile of manure] come from?" - GoodGymer
"From a really big cow" - Joseph

The team tried different ways to organise themselves to:

1. Get manure into wheelbarrows
2. Move the wheelbarrows to the raised beds
3. Tip the manure out and spread it
4. Mix the manure into the existing soil

Joseph wasn't wrong. It was heavy work, from filling the wheelbarrows through to turning the soil. On the upside, it wasn't as stinky as some people feared. Give that giant cow the Nobel prize for Chemistry!

"I've never seen manure that doesn't smell" - Therese

It was a real work out for the team. We managed to fertilise 11 of the raised beds, some of which'll have beans growing in them soon 🫘. Joseph was really impressed, as he always is with what GoodGym achieve with Feeding Ealing.

"You've done more today than 40 people from Tata managed" - Joseph

Big praise for 6 GoodGymers and Therese's husband. 🙌💪