A nice, festive session last night! We were helping out Beckenham Park Care Home with some decorating.

First up, some of us met at the Bridge House (and shared our fave xmas tunes), a few people met at Shortlands Station and a few made their own way to the task.

It was a pretty long run for most of us (4.5k!) but a good way to warm up on a freezing cold night.

When we arrived, we were assigned to different parts of the care home to add festive flourishes:

🎄 Decorating a tree

🌿 Adding fake greenery to the stairs

🍽 Spicing up the dinner tables

🎀 Putting up beads and ribbons around photo frames and on the dog (see pic)

It was good to do an inside task in that weather although I'm not sure most of us expected somewhere so fancy...!

We smashed through it all in half an hour and went our separate ways.

Nice one team! 💪

Four goodgymers met with the Friends of Betts Park volunteers to plant some bulbs on Sunday morning!

Braving the cold November morning, mark, Becky, Louise and Kate planted croucus and daphodils which will come back in the spring bringing colour and wildlife to Betts parks.

We all agreed that bulb planting was a great task generally and you gets lots of them at this time of year.

Generally all smooth sailing apart from when a shriek was heard from Louise, who was gallantly trying to avoid killing a worm who was in the way of her trowel!

I haven’t yet checked to see if that thing we were told as kids is a myth - that is you cut a worm in two, it survives…it makes no sense when you think about it now…but nature is surprising so …

For our second Tuesday evening Bromley sesh (🥳) we were at Southlands Road Allotments. Local sustainability charity Greener and Cleaner have inherited a space which they're turning into a community garden. There's a few fruit trees, a shed of sorts, a compost and not much else. The plan is to turn it into a thriving growing space where the local community can learn to grow and eat fresh fruit and veg! 🥕

Can you dig it?

Job one was digging a hole for a massive metal container. It's going to become an accessible growing bed but first needed cementing in place.

Gettin' twiggy with it

Meanwhile we needed to transfer loads of the twigs and branches from the top of the compost heap into the metal container. These will have compost added and then rot down.

Bottling it

Whilst this was happening, Jo and Clare were cutting up huge plastic bottles into a specific shape so that they can become strawberry pots!

Nailing it

The majority of the materials used for the community garden are repurposed and upcycled. Stephen was removing nails from some pallet wood using a hammer.

Cracking job team! 👍 Thanks for sharing your favourite veg and your energy to get this community green space up and running 💪 Special shoutout to Jo who attended her first GG sesh! Welcome to the gang.