It was great to be back at Hervey road, a garden built from scratch by volunteer leader Annie and her helpers and located in a rescued sports field.

Two Good Gymers had two tasks: the first, handled by Ivar, was to plant lavender in the gaps between the lavender that Good Gym has been steadily planting over the last year to replace the stuff that inattentive drivers have mashed with their cars; and the second, handled by Julian, was to tackle our perennial enemies of alkanet and bramble to give space for the lavender to flourish. In an hour we'd achieved a lot and the two intrepid Good Gymers left to prepare fro their next mission of the day.

3 GoodGym-ers joined the Friends of the Blue Cross Pet Cemetery in Charlton for today's task.

Fur things First, the onset of autumn has been accompanied by the inevitable fallen leaves from the trees surrounding the area, so a big part of our work today involved sweeping the paths & tile grouting.  While some of us got on with this, adding our trugfuls of leaves to the compost heap, others worked on fixing the water butt & its supporting structure, also clearing away a heap of soil & debris which had been borrowed by some nesting rodents.

We always hear some stories about the Cemetery: today's featured the latest memorial being added for a late pet duck, the artwork for which was expected later in the day. 

A quick litterpick & the task was finished.At least until next month where I'm sure there'll be a whole ocean of leaves waiting for us! 🍃

Last night, 9 of us headed out for what turned out to be quite the ponding experience.

Our mission was to give the pond some much-needed TLC. There was plenty of hard work involved, including clearing out the weeds and digging out the stubborn ones, trimming back the ivy, and giving the area around the tomato plants a good weed.

Mark had been endeavored to take it easy on those shoulders, but of course, he couldn't help getting stuck in and digging deep to get to the root of the issue. As he reported today: "digging up those plants definitely took its Pond of Flesh from me.”

There was plenty of newt-ural territory covered in the comments, with everyone getting involved and coming up with increasingly terrible (and therefore brilliant) pond puns. 🐸🤓

The only downside was that it got dark within a few minutes, making it rather difficult to see what we were doing, but we managed to keep the pondemonium under control and no one fell in so that's a success in my book!

A really great difference made last night - thank you everyone - let's not let all these puns water down the achievement… 😉

On Saturday as well as the Parkruns, we've got Clearing up at the Pet Cemetery and weeding at Hervey Road

On sunday we've got Clean up Charlton.

Until next time!

Rachel

Tuesday saw Good Gym back at TRAID in Lewisham, a pre-loved clothes shop that helps to raise money for projects around the world.

3 keen volunteers turned up ready to sort the clothes ready for transfer to a different shop but, wait, were we late? On arrival the racks were already mostly empty, as the regular volunteers had started early. Undaunted, we adapted to the situation and were soon put to work cleaning the racks of dust that was probably there when Methuselah was a boy, The racks clean, we moved on to cleaning the floor and soon everything was looking spick and span.