We had a team of eight join up with the other friends of People's Park to carry out a thorough cleanup of the park.

Weeks of nice weather had attracted lots of daytime park users who left all the usual litter scattered around the fields bushes and trees of this large site. There was also a fair bit of evidence of a night time economy, as well as the fly tipping of a few random items, this time a push chair, a freezer drawer, a walking stick and a children's ride on car thing were the main features of an impressive haul of 16 bags of rubbish!

Weeks of drought are not ideal for recently planted trees and Konni from the Luton Orchards Project has been looking after lots of newly planted fruit trees at various spots around town.

So, when we got a call from Konni about helping to water 70 trees in Wigmore Park's Covid memorial orchard we jumped at the chance to add this worthy task to our schedule.

We started in the town centre and welcomed Esther to her first ever session and had a warm-up. Then we began the 4.5km up-hill to the airport and then to on to the park where Konni waited for us with hose-pipe and watering cans at the ready.

On arrival we set up a watering relay system to make sure every tree got two cans of water, marking the trees with pegs to mark them as done.

We marked a couple of milestones at this session, it was our 200th group run, and Gill brought cupcakes to celebrate recently achieving 500 good deeds! We had a quick celebration with the cupcakes and some Luton apple juice provided by Konni before we bid her farewell and ran back off into the sunset!

Beautiful spring sunshine welcomed us as we gathered at the Green Flag to launch another round of the monthly People's Park litter pick.

Splitting up and roving around the park we collected all the litter dropped by recent park users enjoying the warm weather.

The trees in the orchard also got a thorough watering with those on that task getting lots of steps in by having to walk watering cans out from the nearby houses and across to field to the trees and return for refills.

When our time was up we returned to the flag with our collected bags to count them up: 14 bags in total, not bad for a morning in the sun 🌞

It was a glorious sunny morning, and just the kind of weather to get a good group of us out in People's Park for the monthly litter pick. It was great to see Yasin and Derrick, who we haven't seen for a while. MArtin managed to get in a few extra steps on the walking machine in the play park.

Between us we managed to find all the ingredients from a recent romantic evening at the park, a few spent prophylactics, a half a bottle of whisky, assorted beer cans and wine bottles and even a pair of M&S finest lacy briefs with a delightful lipstick pattern on them!

At the end of the session Rachel treated us to an Easter Egg Hunt, although we were slightly disappointed that she hadn't got dressed up as the Easter Bunny!

The GoodGymers were once again back helping Browns Books with set up before their opening. Today the team were tasked with alphabetising (if that’s even a word) all the shelved books. There were some interesting titles amongst them and we occasionally found ourselves reminiscing and laughing over some of the old school books and annuals in the collection.