Last night we made a return to the garden of the Highfield Unit after a 2 year hiatus. The Highfield is the young people's mental health in-patient unit at Warneford Hospital. Some of the garden has recently been redesigned into a much more inviting space, which was lovely to see.

The garden is divided into 3 sections, so we divided into a trio of teams to weed, prune and lop. We weeded and pruned outside the dining room to give a clearer view of the lovely new garden design, lopped bramble and pulled up nettles in the mosaic garden, and weeded and pruned the shaded corridor space outside some of the bedrooms.

We amassed a large pile of clippings and prunings and worked up a bit of a sweat, so were grateful for the water and biscuits we were given at the end.

Welcome to GoodGym Catriona (Kitty).

With thunder and lightning forecast, and GoodGymers dropping like flies with summer colds, we felt very fortunate to muster a dozen or so helpers and to complete our task in sunshine last night.

Our task was a return visit to Dean Court Community Centre to de-weed the courtyard car park. We detangled bindweed, pruned buddleia, litter picked, weeded planters, pulled up nettles, and generally swept and scraped away all the messier elements.

Delighted to be joined by not 1, but 2 enthusiastic GoodGym pups. Always a joy to have Django and Cass in attendance.

Well done on your 50th Good Deed Sophie, and thank you for the yummy cakes.

Welcome to GoodGym Katie!

This evening might have to go down n Goodgym Oxford annuls as the soggiest task yet! Even before we started we all had rain dripping off our noses!

This was a return visit to Marston Rec to mulch and weed saplings which we helped to plant. Greeted by Alistair and Sylvie, we tried to work as quickly as we could to get all the tasks done before we were soaked beyond our actual skin!

We weeded, card-boarded and mulched some existing saplings and planted some more fruit bushes. At least we won't have to worry about the new plants being destroyed by unusual heat like last year.

After a quick celebratory Viennese Whirl to celebrate the birthdays of Fred and Axelle we dashed off, some of us to run (once you're wet, you're wet right?!?) and some to warm up with burgers and jazzy onsies!

Tiny Forest brings the benefits of woodland right into the heart of our cities and urban spaces: connecting people with nature, helping to mitigate the impacts of climate change, as well as providing nature-rich habitat to support urban wildlife.

Earthwatch is pioneering Tiny Forest in the UK and is conducting a UK-wide research study to help us understand how these super tiny woods have the potential to be super powerful.

Last night Earthwatch Europe launched their Lottery funded partnership with GoodGym at the Littlemore Tiny Forest.

A couple of years ago 600 saplings were planted in a patch of ground 200 metres square (roughly the size of a tennis court), and the plot is now a lovely baby woodland at the end of a wild flower patch.

Earthwatch are collecting data on biodiversity, carbon storage, flood mitigation and thermal comfort in the Tiny Forest in order to see how the scheme could help in urban areas. 100 of the 600 trees in the Littlemore Tiny Forest have been tagged to be regularly monitored, and these were the main focus of our citizen science.

Dividing into trios we made our way around the site checking that the trees were correctly identified in the database, measuring height and girth, and counting the number of stems for multi-stem trees. It turned out to be a very satisfying task - particularly tracking down the last few elusive tagged trees! We managed to find and monitor 58 trees in under an hour.

Other experiments made observations on water soak away and thermal comfort. Tracking the changes over the next few years will be very interesting.

Welcome to GoodGym Mark and Jac. Great to have a visitor from the central team Theresa.