What a welcome for Gina for her first good deed with GoodGym!

She experienced a much warm welcome from the Thorlands Gardens volunteers including Simon and Bridget as well as GoodGym regular, Richard.

Their task was simple. Clear a 40cms length x 100cms width of ground from the location where the community compost will go. There is a worskhop happening on Saturday 4th of May to create these compost bins with the residents, which will be near the future Memorial Garden, where currently there's wood chip is. Working as a team they managed to get the task done within an hour and a half.

It was great to put up Old Spike Peckham and welcome back Sophie who has been in Australia for the past few months. It was also good to see Lucy who hadn't been around these past few weeks. As Maria, Isaac, Rosalind, Daryl, Paulin came in, they discussed about the precious six inches of top soil that is the life blood of humanity. Some deep stuff and quite fitting as our ice breaker snap poll had to do with Earth Day: if you had to go with one policy: clean the ocean of plastics, stop deforestation or embrace cleaner and sustainable energy, which one would you go for? As it hit 18:45, Sam got on with his usual speech and asked for his ice breaker question, he asked which charity people have run or would run for if they did the London Marathon?

In the snap-poll, most want to embrace cleaner and sustainable energy, a couple said clean the ocean and no one went for deforestation. For the marathon question, we had a variety of charities including GoodGym.

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Bath time

Opting for a warm up in the alleyway due to the route taking us out that way, Sam had to do a quick warm-up as the ice-breaker question took too long. With Maria backmarking, off the group went through the backstreets of Peckham/East Dulwich to arrive at East Dulwich station, through the park and the backroute to get to Sunray Avenue near North Dulwich. They had to push and run up the hill for the final part to make it to Denmark Hill Community Garden. Here they met Rose, her partner, Richard just arrived and shortly afterwards so too did Jo and Phil. After a quick introduction, Rose outlined the two main tasks. Firstly, to move three bathtubs out of the way to make space and room for the second task. The second task was to dig a trench a spade deep and a forearm wide.

We split into teams with the girls diving into moving the bath tubs as a group. Paulin, Sophie, Lucy and Rosalind took on the first bath tub finding it somewhat easier than it looked as these bathtubs were filled with soil. The others soon followed to move tub two and three, but Louise, Maria and Jo picked up the dutch hoe and shovels to make a start on the trench. With limited tools, each person took it in turn to help out dig this trench as we soon realised it would be harder than we thought as we couldn't dig deeper than 20 centimetres before encounting gravel and brick. We realised with 10 minutes left that we could only prepare as much as we could and opted to come back next Wednesday - splitting the group with one half going to Thorlands Gardens in Camberwell and the other coming back here.

All was not lost as we had the first HIIT session with Louise and Jo being the only ones joining in and right at the end, we were treated to fresh mint tea, which was a blessing as the night took a cold turn after such a promising sunny start.

After sipping down a warm cuppa, we ran down the hill down to Old Spike in no time and made it back for 20:30.

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Thank You to all the GG-ers

A personal thanks from me to all those who came out last night! Rose was really pleased that we made a start and happy that we can come back next Wednesday to finish the job. Thank you to Maria and Paulin for backmarking.

A different Saturday task at Thorlands as Jo, Maria, Richard and Sam met up Simon and the Thorlands gang to flyer the estate for a community compost workshop on Saturday 4th of May.

Armed with a load of flyers they systematically tackled each estate block in pairs or solo with Simon having the key to open each block door.

Towards the end of the session, Louise showed up to assist in flyering an area as we managed to cover the whole area in an hour and a half. Next Saturday, we will be back to normal arrangements - weeding and woodchipping.

Clare, Richard and Sana met Simon at Thorlands Gardens after it was raining all morning, but 30 minutes before the session started the sun appeared.

There was six sign ups, but three showed up to finish off what the group from last weekend started. In three, they measured and sawed wooden frames to size before attaching it to the frames that were made last weekend. Finally, they used the staple gun to staple in the net. These netted frames will be used to protect young saplings and leafy greens that will grow in the Wild Garden next door. Protecting them from birds and foxes, giving them a fighting chance.

The Thorlands Gardens project continues with more of the same next week plus some planting too.