GoodGym Barnet – Barnet Climate Action Week tiny forest Barnet

A beautiful day to get together at Mutton Brook as part of Barnet Climate Action Week, combining a little practical work, citizen science and a chance to introduce more people to our local Tiny Forests.

Starting at 11am, Richard and Subhamboth local residents, were already on site and quickly got stuck into some litter picking after a chat about the four Tiny Forests.

The original Tiny Forest is now well established, but the three newer forests have endured a brutal summer and are showing signs of stress, with some struggling trees and plenty of weeds.

These three forests are particularly interesting because each has a different soil preparation method. Looking up the slope, the middle plot uses biochar, the right-hand plot follows the standard Miyawaki method, and the left-hand plot uses a simpler, no-dig approach incorporating cardboard. On general inspection, the middle biochar forest appears to be showing the strongest growth, although proper measurements will tell us more. Victoria said Yes lots of fun. Like high school science class again haha!

’innovative approach to growing trees with the help of biochar was recently featured on BBC Countryfile at Blenheim Palace on 1 February 2026. You can find out more on BBC iPlayer.https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002qwy0

Roman & Victoria were both new to the Tiny Forest project and got stuck into our citizen science work, identifying trees, recording their positions along a transect and measuring their diameters. This helps us monitor growth and understand their potential for carbon capture. We’ll share the data with Earthwatch and hopefully continue these measurements over the coming months.

It was also a lovely opportunity to chat about our local community and the wider work GoodGym gets involved with, supporting green spaces, community groups and projects that encourage people to get outdoors and take practical action.

And, as has become something of a GoodGym tradition, we rounded things off with a little frisbee throwing and a runaround for anyone who fancied it!

A big thank you to everyone who came along. A lovely mix of practical volunteering, learning something new and enjoying our local green spaces together. That’s what GoodGym is all about!

Tonight's task saw 12 Greenwich GoodGym-ers meet for a de-brambling session at Vanbrugh Pits in Blackheath.

Talk of favourite shops, past and present, got us through our relative journeys, and we were just about to walk on by, when suddenly, and without warning, there was this Partial Eclipse of the Sun! It got slightly dark, and there was this strange humming sound, like something from another world...🎵

OK, so that's actually a line from a Little Shop of Horrors song. Thankfully, the brambles we had to tackle weren't carnivorous like the one from the musical, but were pretty prickly, so we made good use of the tools provided, including loppers, forks, and mattocks, hacking & twirling and digging out roots. After a few trips to pile up the cuttings for collection by the local council, our time was up, and the "after" photo shows what a dent we made in the overgrown area. A total Eclipse of the Bark indeed!

Thanks all & see you soon ☀️🌙