The Early May Bank Holiday weekend sounds like a time when everyone wants to get away to enjoy a break, right? Wrong! A revolutionary team of 12 GoodGymers descended on Horsenden Farm, redefining Italian cuisine and the rules of landscaping.

Such impressive numbers guaranteed at least a double task, so the team split into two. Sevan, Richard, Thaiza, Amy, Maxime and Afshin went up Horsenden Hill to marvel at the views while dealing with treacherous spikes, while Penny, Danny, Kat, Steph Ducat, Augustin and Kash headed down to the car park to make a very special lasagne.

The first team continued the task started last month at the top of the hill. The goal was to remove as much prickly hawthorn as possible to make space for the Horsenden cows to graze and enrich the ecosystem with their wonderful cow pies - a buffet for countless insects, fungi, and bacteria, and a source of nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium for plants to grow.

With thick gloves and loppers, the six GoodGymers finished off the leftover hawthorn from April and moved on to the next patch, where the newest addition to the team, Amy, spotted a memorial sign and cut through the spiky plants, determined to find out what was written on it. What a start! Amy met us last month at another outdoor task, so we knew she'd fall in love with losing herself in Horsenden's nature. Welcome, Amy!

The hilltop team destroyed the second hawthorn patch in no time and moved on to make a start at the third one, which they had to leave unfinished. Throwing the tangled, spiky cuttings over the fence and pushing them down was not a quick and easy job as one might think. The group made great progress, with some hawthorn still left behind for the next volunteer group.

The second team was a team of cooks. As you can imagine, things can get tricky when you get too many of them. To add to the complexity of the intricate lasagne recipe we had to follow, we were boosted by two additional cooks (other Horsenden volunteers). Luckily, Elsa, our task owner and chef, joined the group to masterfully coordinate the execution of her staple recipe:

Compost Lasagne

(Serves: 1 happy ecosystem)

Prep time: As long as it takes to fill a wheelbarrow
Cook time: A few months (slow food at its finest)

Ingredients

• 4 parts “green waste” 🌿 (plant trimmings + signature “lasagne sh*ts” a.k.a. manure)
• 6 parts woodchip 🪵
• A willing team of GoodGymers

Equipment

• Pitchfork 🍴
• Shovel 🥄
• Wheelbarrow 🛒

Method

1. Lay down a generous base of lasagne sh*ts. This is your rich foundation.
2. Sprinkle a layer of plant waste over the top. Think of it as your herby middle layer.
3. Cover with a thick layer of woodchip to seal everything in and keep things nicely balanced.
4. Drizzle a light splash of compost béchamel (questionable brown liquid) over the layer.
5. Keep layering: manure, greens, woodchip, 2 to 3 times, or until your compost lasagne reaches impressive heights.
6. Let it rest - leave your masterpiece to slowly “cook” down into beautiful compost.

Bon appétit (for the soil)! 🌍

Chef’s tip

The secret ingredient is teamwork and not taking yourself too seriously.

After assembling three impressive lasagne, we left nature to do the rest of the cooking. We then all headed for a well-deserved team lunch, which offered an equally unconventional take on Italian cuisine: pizza with a pickle and egg!

If you think that sounds like a fun thing to do on a Saturday morning, join us next month at Horsenden Farm!

Today was the day for GoodGym's annual spring session in Elthorne Triangle with HANGOT. Like previous years, the aim was to prepare the fruit trees and walnut tree in the orchard to give the local community the best chance of picking some fruit in the summer. The difference this year was that the 10 amazing GoodGymers present blitzed through the task with half an hour to spare.

The session started with a GoodGym classic, mulching! Unlike last month's session with HANGOT, the wood chip was sitting at the top of the hill instead of the bottom, so today team had the slightly easier task of wheeling it down to the trees in need and spreading it around the trunks.

In the orchard, Mirjam, one of the long running HANGOT members, was giving GoodGymers and others lessons about the orchard. They learned some interesting facts about the weeds that the team were tackling:

"You can tell this is hemlock because of the purple splodges on its stems."
"Where you see it, there can be up to 7 years worth of seeds in the ground already."
"That means we need to catch it early, before it seeds, for 7 years to kill it off." - Mirjam

So all of the hemlock and burdock, no matter how small, needed to be found and chopped. Iram took special pleasure in slicing young burdock stems after being attacked by it at last month's task. Surprisingly, the team also learned that nettles are actually good for something:

"The nettles are good for increasing biodiversity."
"That will enable children to come to the orchard as an educational space." - Mirjam
"Do you mean educating them not to touch the nettles?" - Sevan

Despite the breaks taken for bad jokes, the team made fast progress. With the areas around the trees mulched and the unwanted weeds chopped, everyone was wondering what the next job was. There wasn't one. The team had ticked off everything on HANGOT's list in a hour, so they went early to a local coffee shop for today's social.

Great work everyone!

Cloudy Saturday with a small drizzle of rain, but Goodgym present including first timer Kirsteen. What a place to start your Goodgym journey. Then we had the usual suspects to volunteer at Horseden or where they here just for the pizzas?!At least we know that Steph Ducat and Ashley were. Richard for the craft beer? Penny didn't stay for food but went for takeaway hot drink. Elsa had 2 tasks for us which one only required 1 Goodgymer to help John. Afshin volunteered and found himself moving railway sleepers and digging holes to plant massive poles - think he had a great work out. The others followed Elsa with tools all the way to the top of the hill - great view of Ealing. We then earned our scars following a battle with black thorns. Cleared an area of blacktorns and settled them on top of a natural fence behind the fence. A few scratches on legs and arms, but we won the battle. We all rolled down the hill to get lovely food and refreshments. Last but not least : Penny will be part of the black T-shirt gang as reached 50 good deeds today!!Congrats.

For Ealing GoodGymers' second session at Care4Calais this month, there were more newly arrived donations from other charities and storage units to sort through. There were new requests too from beneficiaries and some admin work to complete.

Kash prepared packs for new requests that had come in. Finding everything that was needed mostly went smoothly, except an unusual request for orthopedic shoes that couldn't be sourced in the stock room. When the pre-prepared medium clothing packs for men ran out, small packs were substituted in their place with the hope that recipients would be on the slimmer side. Kash finished the session with record keeping, noting down which requests had been fulfilled for beneficiaries.

In another room, Penny, Maria and Sevan were working through the incoming donations. Most of the clothing was for women and children, including a bag full of tiny, cute baby clothes. There was a lot of variety in the other boxes too, with some upmarket women's clothing, children's football boots that went straight back out to a recipient and some unusual olive coloured cloth. It took a while to figure out what the olive material should be used for. Was it an enormous comedy bow tie? Was it a blanket? Maria eventually got the gold star by figuring out that they were trousers that tied together at each hip ⭐.

With the new clothes sorted, it was time to move them into the stock room. Here, the team found a problem as there were more women's clothes coming in than were being given out. Netball and basketball skills came in useful as clothes were shot towards the sky, landing on top of tall piles of stock (there was a sense of déjà vu with this). Where no more clothes could fit on or above the shelves, there were overflow bags dotted around the room, which also filled up. Thankfully, the men's and children's clothes didn't have the same problem.

The next trip to Care4Calais is on the 12th of April, where Sevan offered to help task owner Tamzin clear out some of the excess stock.