It's been two years since GoodGym Ealing popped up at Popesfield Allotment for a task - can you believe it? While we supported Cultivate London at their projects in Acton and Hanwell, it was high time to revisit the plant nursery at the youngest allotment site in Ealing. And what did we see? The plant nursery has been doing well, but the membrane underneath the pallets with plant pots needed some TLC.

Steph, Sevan and Kash ran a short distance to Popesfield, but for Steph, the difficulty didn't decrease with the mileage as he carried a huge work backpack, worthy of standing for a military training rucksack. The three met Harvey and Maxime, the latter recently having led his first session as TaskForce - congratulations, Maxime! Maxime had led a weekend task nowhere else but in Popesfield, so everyone was hoping to use his know-how about opening all the locks to get to the site and the tools. Fortunately, the instructions were clear, and the team didn't need to rely on specialist knowledge.

The job was simple: pull out the weeds creeping out from the black membrane in front of the sheds, sweep debris, and place all the waste in a tonne bag. Five GoodGymers approached the big job with zeal and thoroughness, pulling the grass from the membrane like there was no tomorrow. In an hour, they cleared the weeds and gravel from the whole open area of the membrane, leaving only parts of the paths between pallets unfinished.

What a thorough job! I am truly impressed, and you say you are not gardeners? - Romina, task owner from Cultivate London.

Next week, GoodGym Ealing opts for an indoor task at the Tuesday group run (just about when it starts getting lighter and warmer in the evenings!). We will be helping to clean and organise a children’s activity space at St Mary's in South Ealing. Sign up now!

Sevan and Kash had visited Mrs R in Shepherd’s Bush a year and a half ago for a hedge trimming task. Back then, the lady had lived upstairs and struggled to keep all the neighbours happy: some complained about her hedge getting out of control, others were disgruntled about GoodGymers making too radical cuts to it. This year, it turned out, Mrs R had moved downstairs following a fire in her previous flat. That meant one of the neighbours was no longer on the list of people to please, but the challenge of keeping the hedge and the tree in the front garden trimmed remained. Unfortunately, Mrs R has lost her tools in the incident in her upstairs flat, so Sevan and Kash couldn’t do any cutting back and had to find another job.

Mrs R thought that moving heavy pots with plants to the back garden would be a good alternative to improve accessibility for her wheelchair, bin men, the ambulance crew and the firefighters. The lady learned the hard way that large pots obstructing the path to the front door and the windows posed a serious safety risk for someone like her.

Mrs R must have felt much better than the week before when Steph had paid her a visit and had transformed an even more chaotic space into a neat, tidy garden. She asked for a chair and spent the whole session with Sevan and Kash in the front garden, instructing them and telling stories about how important gardening had been in her family.

”It’s such a lovely day to do this today!” - Mrs R.

The older lady was a keen gardener, in love with roses and lilies of all colours you could imagine. She’s been a winner of an award for the best garden in West London for four years, just like her dad, a gardener, had been winning prizes for his work. Mrs R believed that the art of gardening would keep her children out of trouble, so she taught them to get busy in the garden and stay away from the gangs. Together, they grew not only flowering plants. They also had a cherry tree and a veg bed with potatoes, aubergines, footlong cucumbers and four types of chillies - impressive!

Back in the present, Sevan and Kash were staying out of trouble, exercising their muscles and brains in an effort to transport all the pots worth keeping (a.k.a. the heaviest ones) to the backyard. Some of the pots they carried without emptying individually, others were carried in tandem. There were pots that had to be rolled over the carpet through the house, making a terrible mess (which Mrs R had accepted). Finally, for the really big boys, Sevan and Kash decided on emptying them. The best soil made it to the back garden in plastic buckets, where Kash had re-planted six rose bushes the GoodGymes had uprooted from the largest pots. What initially looked like a mammoth task for strongmen has been achieved by two Ealing GoodGymers, even the miraculous transport of a rosemary plant with the soil after its pot fell apart!

”You've got to have faith” - commented Mrs R, George Michael-style.

Sevan and Kash finished the session with a bit of sweeping and separating the rubbish from the pots worth giving away, which they had left in front of Mrs R’s garden for interested (and able to lift!) people to collect.

To reach the Care4Calais on late Sunday morning, Sevan and Kash ran from Acton up and down Hanger Hill. At the task location, they met James, who had arrived for his first task in Ealing. The fourth musketeer slot had been filled by one of Tamzin's recent regular volunteers who himself lived in a hotel for asylum seekers that Care4Calais supported.

The challenge task owner Tamzin had this spring was the abundance of stock (partially due to other C4C storage spaces handing her their goods) and a halved number of requests from the hotels. Those were generally good problems to have.

Sevan joined Tamzin in making custom packs, while Kash, James and the third volunteer sorted through loads of women's and men's clothes. If you think the abundance of outfits made it easier for Sevan to find a t-shirt for a woman who had requested it, think again. He had to dig through the layers of tangled long-sleeved tops in the overflowing boxes and couldn't even reach the most suitable one, which must have been buried underneath.

Meanwhile, for the sorting crew, the task of putting filtered clothes away was the main challenge: squeezing things in, finding the overflow bags for the surplus items and making new containers for clothes that were impossible to fit anywhere. Despite having to virtually bend the rules of physics to find homes for all the outfits, the team smashed sorting the whole huge batch of donations in two hours!

Notable finds:

• Christmas-themed Elf movie pyjamas
• An elf hat
• Skull socks (sadly, not suitable for refugees)
• A straw fedora hat
• African headscarves
• A Minion's costume

Today's Acton Junior parkrun was full of changes as usual. Before the start, there were lots of swaps being discussed, with a few of the GoodGymers wishing that that could take someone else's role. Harvey could have done without the pressure of time keeping and Maria, who was tail walking, wasn't in the mood for grumpy or crying children today.

Kash and Sevan were pretty content marshalling, along with Hassan who was up bright and early for his first good deed. Hassan had joined for a social run earlier in the year and was back today to help the Junior parkrun run smoothly. Welcome to GoodGym! 👏🥳. Finally, Joanna was cool as a cucumber, time keeping alongside Harvey, trying to ease the pressure.

The main drama was a Greener Ealing van that decided to invade the course and was moved on by the Run Director just in time for the runners to get going. The driver said that they were in the park every Sunday morning, so they should already have known to stay out of the way. Even Maria had a quiet time today as all of the children were happy to be running around the course, from the front of the field to the back.