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.

Animal of the month for our regular catch up at the City Farm was the sheep 🐑.

The sheep are currently hanging out in the field where we helped out planting a new orchard last year.

Tim set about clearing an area of paving, that to us looked like a sheep dance floor. We reckon sheep probably like to boogie to '80s music - Love Wool Tear Us Apart, Lamb Rap! (Enjoy What Ewe Do), And The Bleat Goes On, that sort of thing...

Dan and Ellie, possibly not fancying the steep, muddy, slipperiness of this field, volunteered for manure duties.

The rest of us set about clearing the area of dead thistle stalks, which the sheep don’t really like, and helping prepare a tasty meal of nettles.

Eventually the dance floor came to life, with the sheep moving in for feeding time. Even the young lambs were tucking in to the solid food now. Yum!

We're a resourceful bunch of natural born problem solvers here at GoodGym Bath.

Today we met at Alice Park to do a couple of random, unconnected tasks:

• To line a planting bed - imagine an area of approximately 2 metres by 1 metre - to stop the "contents" leaking out.
• Construct a wicker fence to border off an area of path so as to stop unwanted passers-by entering onto parts of the site we wouldn't want them to visit.

That's all, nothing sinister.

Emily, Stephen, Meyrick and Jer (not real names..) started work on improving the planting bed. A second bed had previously been lined in a similar manner, for some other unspecified reason, so we had that as an example to guide our work..

We're clearly a bunch of True Crime aficionados since, after one of us (no names, to protect the innocent) noted that the aforementioned 2x1 sized bed would be the perfect size to fit, say, your enemy, discussions turned to related gardening topics, such as: how to most efficiently compost down organic matter if you were in a particular hurry to do so; how best to line the sides of a container so as to stop the contents getting out; and when they say pigs will eat anything, do they really mean everything?

Over on the fence-laying crew, that team started by hammering in posts into the ground. The posts needed to go in as deep as possible, for obvious reasons. The bulk of the task then involved carefully weaving branches between the posts.

Back at the planting bed, Meyrick was adroitly cutting up compost bags like a surgeon to act as the lining material; Emily was demonstrating surprising proficiency with a staple gun; and Stephen and Jer have clearly done a considerable amount of digging in their time. Wearing gloves at these kind of gardening tasks is always advised to, you know, keep your hands clean, avoid leaving fingerprints, stuff like that.

As fence team stopped at the halfway point for a coffee, team planting bed were so close to finishing up their job and making it look like noone had even been there that, that they stayed on to finish.

At their own coffee break, our host noted what a lovely clean job the team had made of their planting bed, and would they be so kind as to take a look at the other planter to tidy up that work a little, so as to make the lining work a little less obvious to prying eyes. Meanwhile, team fence finished up by chamfering around the edges of their woodwork, to better hide the evidence of their own craftwork.

Aaron noted that some of the posts had been difficult to get very deep in to the ground, and our host was telling us how the site has a membrane layer since there was formerly some kind of ground contamination below a certain layer. So I'd advise anyone to, say, never dig too deep on this site in case of what you find.

All in all two excellent jobs well done. It's like we were never there. In fact we were never there, ignore anything you might have just read...

Welcome

A special welcome to new GoodGymer, Upneet. It was great to have you along! The run reports aren't necessarily always quite this "creative" ... but if you can imagine, it's hard sometimes finding new and interesting ways to write "and then we did some gardening"... :)

Inspired by the Slow Ways initiative that aims to verify a network of thousands of walking and cycling routes across the UK, Goodgymers from Bath donned their walking boots and took to the Kennet and Avon canal path from Bath to Bradford-on-Avon in Wiltshire.

It's arguably one of the most beautiful "Slow Ways" in the country. Meyrick, who selected the route, was accompanied by Cosmo, Jer, Mary, Ruth and Jane and her equally beautiful dog, Ted, who had more energy than all of us.

Along the way we enjoyed fantastic views. There were narrowboats with amazing paintwork and names, reflections in the water, wonderful scenes and lots of other towpath users, including four swans.

Jane, who is a boat dweller herself, bumped into quite a few people she knew too.

The main danger - apart from the fact that you are heading alongside a waterway - was probably from cyclists but they all used their bells - and one whistled - and we travelled without incident.

We think this was a record length of mission - more than four hours. It provided an opportunity for us all to get to know each other better and was time well spent.

I know I started to flag a bit in the second half of the journey and the prospect of making our way home but I brightened up at the prospect of a lift home. Big thanks to Meyrick who drove over to Bradford first thing and then came back on the train to meet us at the start.

There is a bit of a mystery in that the Slow Ways walk was advertised as around eight miles, yet, according to my Strava we walked 11.4 miles. This might have something to do with the detour we made along the Somerset Coal Canal for a light lunch at the Angelfish cafe.

We did lose one Goodgymer along the way but she went on to greater things. Mary, who is in training, left us near Avoncliff to do the journey back to Bath on foot. She could have gone the distance but was put off by the prospect of it getting dark.

Well done to Meyrick for organising the mission and Mary for her impressive contribution.

Note: You may wonder why I'm wearing a fez in the pictures - I'm taking part a fundraising challenge.