55 Month Streak
77 Month Streak
Sessions listed
Sessions led
Sessions backmarked
Walks led
Sessions photographed
Reports written
Ealing
Will make her house much cleaner and she will feel less stresssed.

Sun 15th Nov at 2:30pm
Thu 12th Nov at 6:00pm
Will make her house much cleaner and she will feel less stresssed.
Read moreSat 21st Nov at 10:00am
Help create an accessible green space that will provide food, horticulture and leisure for the community
Read moreTue 10th Nov at 6:45pm
Ealing Report written by Dora (She/her)
Deep in Walpole Park lies a mulch mountain underneath a thick blanket of fallen leaves. Our job? To dig deep and mine for gold! Or - rather - to dig deep and mine for dark brown mulch, otherwise know as ‘the good stuff’! This nutrient heavy mulch was then to be taken to the kitchen garden to be used as food for the plants there.
First, in the dark and the rain, we climbed the mountain and with spades tossed the leaves aside; Sevan and Kash were first to the top! We hacked at the leaves causing wet (yet also incredibly dusty) avalanches - but we persevered and soon we reached the darkest and tastiest mulch. We filled wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow and Steph took charge of taking the mulch to the kitchen garden.
If you didn’t know, mulch mountains contain all sorts of unexpected obstacles- rocks, weird fumes and logs bigger than you or I - no problem for Kash who dug the logs out and launched them aside.
Finding the ‘good mulch’ was quite a challenge as there were so many layers of wet heavy leaves and half cooked mulch and so, when we did - Amy declared it her favourite task ever.
Surprisingly none of us sunk in the pile and needed to be rescued but also - none of us came away with dry shoes!
Wed 11th Nov at 9:16am
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Wed 11th Nov at 8:29pm
Utterly fantastic mountaineering, thank you so much from the Walpole Park Kitchen Garden Volunteers.
Tue 8th Dec at 8:00pm
Get together with Ealing GoodGymers before Christmas
Read moreFri 4th Dec at 7:00pm
Help create a festive atmosphere for the upcoming community event
Read moreSat 14th Nov at 4:00pm
Completing this task would make a significant difference to Mr P's safety, independence and quality of life at home.
Read moreSat 14th Nov at 2:00pm
He enjoys gardening and sitting outside but as he is older this is a lot harder ,
Read moreSun 8th Nov at 3:00pm
The mission Sevan and Kash had signed up for was advertised as cutting back a garden ahead of Bonfire Night. Unfortunately, no GoodGymers were available before 5 November, or even the following Saturday, when Bonfire Night would likely be celebrated. The task eventually went ahead on Sunday.
Mission Control had prepared Sevan and Kash for the eventuality of not having any tools on hand. That scenario materialised when Mr T announced that he had neither equipment nor bags for the garden waste. While the task was supposed to focus on the overgrown front garden, dotted with brambles, rumours had it that tools could once be found in a shed in the back garden. Unfortunately, Mr T thought the back garden was completely inaccessible and didn't encourage the GoodGymers to try that route. Sevan and Kash had two choices: admit defeat and back off, or use their hands. They chose the latter.
Luckily, both had their bramble gloves with them and started pulling out thorny plants and snapping sycamore saplings. For the thicker brambles that they couldn't pull out by the roots, they resorted to good old-fashioned Stone Age tools. Sharp-edged rocks may be inferior to a pair of secateurs, but they're equally deadly against brambles in the hands of a determined GoodGymer.
Halfway through the task, by which point the front garden already looked much better (although the waste couldn't be swept up and bagged), Sevan and Kash encountered Mr T's neighbour. The neighbour explained the challenges posed by Mr T's back garden and took Kash on a tour to show her what it looked like from the neighbouring house's first-floor window. It was basically a monster of a bramble forest, untouched for three years, bulging against the fence on the verge of collapsing into the neighbour's garden.
The GoodGymers decided to borrow the neighbour's shears and use the last 30 minutes of the session to convince Mr T to let them investigate his back garden and see the jungle first-hand. And a jungle it was! There was certainly no way to guarantee making it Bonfire Night-proof, even if three sessions had taken place in the previous week!
Behind the back door in the kitchen, the first thing they discovered was vines hanging down the entire length of the stairs to the garden. Just past the entrance, Sevan and Kash spotted a box of tools under a cover. The roof wasn't technically a shed, and the protruding handles of the tools looked too good to be true. The GoodGymers were right not to get their hopes up too high.
All the tools were covered in rust. The loppers moved without needing WD-40, but had a big gap between the blades, which rendered them unusable. The shears wouldn't close, and the pruning shears wouldn't open. In the tools department, the GoodGymers were back to square one. Sevan found a rusty saw in the toolbox and pressed on, hacking away at the brambles and vines as best he could, while Kash took the neighbour's shears and ventured forward, cutting a narrow corridor through the brambles along the fence to see if she could make it as far as the mythical shed or the back fence.
Kash made it quite far into the jungle, stopping about two metres before the end of the garden. She could make out the back wall or fence behind the brambles in front of her. There was also a shape on the much more overgrown left-hand side, but she couldn't cut through the old, thick brambles with the shears. Whether the mythical shed had fully collapsed, and whether there were any tools inside, remains a mystery.
Mr T's jungle is one of those gardens in the GoodGym world that may look insurmountable, but Sevan and Kash believed that, with enough people helping across multiple sessions and the neighbour's support with tools, a difference could be made. The Gunpowder Plot may have failed, but the plan to tackle Mr T's garden was still very much a work in progress.
Sun 8th Nov at 12:00pm
Islington Report written by Sevan
After Ms M's partner passed away a few years ago and after needing to evacuate her house, both of their belongings were returned to a storage room that was piled high. Kash and Sevan arrived to help Ms M find precious photo albums that she thought were hiding somewhere in that room.
Initially, Ms M didn't sound very sure about what was important for her to find, then paperwork came to mind, quickly followed by a blue and a red photo album. After asking for more details of what the albums looked like, Kash and Sevan started the hunt, searching high and low, in boxes and on shelves. Soon and blue and brown albums were spotted on a high shelf. The blue was a hit and the (reddy) brown a miss, so the search went on.
Finding the photo albums and other folders of photos triggered more memories. Ms M remembered that there should be a framed photo of her partner. The best one that Ms M had ever taken, she said. A new hunt started for photo frames. A few were found with portraits of the couple, not the solo portrait that Ms M had in her mind.
As the room was packed, Kash and Sevan began reorganising to keep similar things together. Sevan took care of finding lost CDs, DVDs and books to group them on the same shelves. Kash arranged Ms M's partner's artwork. With bright and colourful paintings, fabrics, canvases and animal sculptures all over the room, she found clear spaces to stack them up.
At the last minute, Ms M remembered about the computer equipment that she used to have. Luckily, Kash and Sevan already knew where that was hiding. With no clear surfaces to put them onto though, that would be a job for next time as well as finding that red photo album.
Very little was disposed of during the mission and still, the corner of the room where the GoodGymers were working looked remarkably neater than at the start. Ms M too was happy that everything was better organised at the end of the session.
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