The plan: sand and varnish the benches at one of our regular meeting locations.
The reality: Turned up to find the benches awash with water, so no sanding or varnishing happened, and instead we took our trusty litterpickers and cleaned up Marston Road and some of the surrounding residential streets.

It was always a long shot to schedule a painting task this late in the year, so fortunately we had a backup plan!

Autumn means we pivot away from our summer of gardening and nature reserve tasks and resume our monthly deep cleaning of the food bank on Cowley Road.

The day-to-day tasks at the food bank take up all the time of volunteers, so there is never time to shift shelving and give everywhere a really thorough clean. Over the last couple of years we have become efficient at working our way round the main hall of the foodbank from October to March, deep cleaning a different section each month.

Last night we started our process. Splitting our team between kitchen and main hall, we shifted and cleaned crates and shelving, swept the floors, mopped the floors, sorted through fresh produce to ditch anything going off (some VERY mouldy mushrooms!), cleaned fridges, disinfected the walls, and took out food waste. A one hour flash-mob can make light of a deep clean.

Great work team!

Every autumn since 2019 GoodGym Oxford have joined Alistair (the mastermind behind Marston Community Gardeners) planting daffodil bulbs around the streets of Marston. This year we are turning our attention to the Marsh Lane area. It is one of the main routes into Oxford, particularly if you are heading to one of the hospitals, and so it would be great if it had a sweep of daffodils all the way along the route to welcome people into the city.

Thanks to it having been a wetter summer it was a lot easier to get a spade in the ground this year, so we made great progress planting up around the junction with the ring road until the failing light stopped play.

Watch out for the blooms in March!

Congratulations Bethan on reaching 300 good deeds!

The Cherwell Collective run a food larder, Climatarian Kitchen and food growing collective (Harvest at Home). Based in Kidlington, they support people all over Cherwell District. This time of year they are deep into harvest, saving people's spare fruit and veggies and distributing them at the larder, or cooking them up into delicious meals to serve up at the Climatarian Kitchen.

Last night a couple of homeowners in Lower Heyford had promised the fruit from their apple trees to the larder, and so GoodGym took a short road trip out of Oxford to help with the gleaning.

Ladders, tarpaulins, and big sticks in hand we shook down, picked, and collected up 6 crates of apples from 2 gardens in Lower Heyford. Django the dog was semi-helpful at searching and retrieving falling apples (great at finding, not so great at giving back!), and we discovered heads for heights and tree climbing/precarious balancing skills we never knew we had.

Our harvest will get cooked up and given away, supporting people struggling with the cost of living and saving good food from going to waste.