Tonight we celebrated Earth Day with a digging task. It was a continuation of what we started last week at St Mary's Farnham Royal Primary School in their learning garden.

Last week we dug up bed 2 and removed as many weeds as we could. This evening we carried on ensuring the bed was weed free and did a little bit more around the strawberry and garlic sections.

We met directly at the task and our task owner Chrissy made sure we were given all the access we needed.

Great to have Firmo and Jason join us on their first task tonight. And Anna on her second task. Hope you enjoyed it and will come back again soon.

It's your bEARTH DAY!

So what exactly is Earth Day?

Earth Day is an annual event on April 22 to demonstrate support for environmental protection. First held on April 22, 1970, it now includes a wide range of events coordinated globally by EARTHDAY.ORG (formerly Earth Day Network) including 1 billion people in more than 193 countries. The official theme for 2024 is "Planet vs. Plastics." 2025 will be the 55th anniversary of Earth Day. It includes a wide range of events and activities arranged by Earthday.org. Check out their website for more info - Earth Day: The Official Site | EARTHDAY.ORG

Planets vs Plastics

The theme this year for Eath Day is Planet vs Plastics

Did you know?

• Global plastics has reached an estimated 460 million metric tons in recent years;

• It is estimated that 75 to 199 million tons of plastic are currently in our oceans;

• One million plastic bottles are purchased every minute worldwide, while up to five trillion plastic bags are used a year;

Earthday.org have a goal to reduce plastics by 60% by 2040 (60X40).

At GoodGym we are very active in litter picks and keeping our outdoor spaces clean and clear, we get involved in helping community groups with restoring their nature areas back to useable spaces as well as supporting conservation groups with their projects....but can we do more?

Check out this toolkit for some ideas -

EarthDay-2024-Toolkit-March-12th-Update.pdf

So after all this information on Earth Day 2024 and completing our task this evening, we did a mini fitness session in the playground - after all it's important to keep ourselves active and fit! The team did really well in the circuits based exercises which consisted of ladder exercises; med ball throws and slams; kettlebell swings; cone to cone running and good old fashioned playground hopping and jumping!

We will be sad to see Hamid leave Slough. We hope you will come and visit us and we are always here to help you Hamid so please keep in touch.

And finally….. huge congratulations to Ricky on his London Marathon race yesterday! He smashed it with a new marathon personal best as well as a huge time off his half marathon timing!! And he looked fresh as a daisy when Harsha and I saw him at mile 23(ish) with the GoodGym cheer squad! We are all so proud you!

Next week we will be meeting at Salt hill activity Centre, in Salthill park, Bath Rd, SL1 3SS. Our task is to help Raggy Rd Allotments with their allotment space. We will be walking or running down to the allotments.

This evening we were doing a spot of gardening for St Mary’s Farnham Royal Primary school. The task was to tidy up bed number 2 and get it ready for the children to do some planting. This area of the playground is used by the children as part of their learning garden and like any other garden it needs a bit of TLC.

There was no run for this task as the location of the school didn’t have an accessible road where we could park then run so we made it a ‘make your own way’ session.

But we did have a fitness session lined up!

Great to have Zoe join us on her first Slough session. Thank you for coming along.

And it’s was so so good to see Mehdi return back to this area. His journey from Slough to the Bibby Stockholm barge and back to Hounslow has been a painful one and we have very much have missed having him at the sessions. In the background we had lots of the Slough members petition our local MP for his help in getting Mehdi taken off the barge plus we started an online petition.

I hope all our efforts somehow triggered Mehdi being taken off the barge and bought back closer to us. For this we are very grateful. We even had a rainbow over us tonight celebrating his return.

Easy-Peas-y

With all the rain we’d had recently the task was a nice easy one. Digging up the weeds and turning over the soil was easy peas-y! Nothing beets a bit of gardening. Lucky Peter had bought some ‘adult’ tools but the kiddy sized spades were just as good for us shorter ones!

Within 35 minutes we had completed the task and made it look totally radishing!

Thyme for some fitness!

With kettlebells, med balls and resistance bands as our kit we had 3 sets of 4 exercises on a rep range of 8. Everyone did very well with the root-ine!

Then we finished off with a best out of 5 basketball shots! Hamid and Peter drew at 2 each and went head to head for a final play off!

Ruth took the photo of the night! I never knew I could have flying feet whilst throwing a ball!

Thank you to everyone for coming down tonight to help.

Next week is Earth Day so we will be back at St Mary’s primary school doing something good for the soil!

Be great to see you there!

https://www.goodgym.org/v3/sessions

What's up with the April showers! A bit of sun would be nice but the extra daylight is definately welcomed!

This evening it was less of a 'group' session and more of a 'pair'

With only Peter and I in attendance supported by task owner Gaye, we went with an earlier start time to take advantage of the light. We hadn't factored for the rain so were a bit drowned by the end but none the less we managed to get the two beds fully turned over.

Uprooted

Although the aim of the task was to remove the garlic and potatoes. The poor worms though that had their evenings uprooted by us probably weren't too happy!

I'm away now until the 16th so next weeks task is being led by Helen.

It was a much smaller than usual team out tonight helping Ujala Foundation with their community garden. Thank you to Peter and Jean for coming along tonight to help.

Jean and I got there early tonight so we took advantage of the light and went for a mile run around the block and got back just in time as Peter arrived.

Our task owner Gaye was already in the garden waiting for us. It was lovely to see her again. Gaye told us the areas to focus on. The garlic bed!!

You could really smell the garlic as we dug deep and pulled out all the 'hairy' roots! With the fading light we worked as quick as we could and did manage to get one strip of the bed turned over.

We will be back again next week to do some more.

Tonight's task has a theme going through it...and I'll give you a pew to what it is!

When I checked the sign up list last night and only I was signed up, I did have a momentary panic so I sent a little note on the whatsapp group to see if anyone else could join me...luckily both Peter and Sara were able to come along...pew for that.

I knew Leonie (our task owner would be present), so I wasn't too phased if I did have to do the task alone, however it's always good to have some company.

Our meet up point was Upton Court Park at 6.30pm with the option of a walk or run down to the Church. Only Peter met me at the park, the rest of the team made their own way to the Church (on time)...on arrival we did see a few people lingering around the entrance so I personally was very grateful to have Peter and Hamid (who was now with us too) to wait with....a blessing in disguise!

We were soon joined by Devajani so were ready to go inside to see what our task was.

Leonie explained that they had a concert on Sunday and needed some help with sweeping the floors, vacuuming the altar, cleaning the pews and the entrance area....and a little bit of high dusting!

We had a web of laughter as we chatted, caught up on our weekly antics and cracked on with the task in hand.

Peter and Hamid took to the sweeping duties like pro's whilst Sara was on hoovering and Devajani and I took a pew.

It is always amazing how quickly and efficiently we can all work and get the task done. Within 50 minutes we had swept, hoovered and wiped. Then Hamid took the longest duster we have ever seen and cleared away cobwebs that had most likely been hanging around for years! And that's no web of lies! But pew we did it!