Legends about the feats of strength, bursts of joy, and - most importantly - samosas at Western Road in Southall spread quickly outside the Ealing Borough. The accounts reach as far North as Ickenham, where our newest addition to the team lives: Zahra!

Zahra made Western Road her first GoodGym session and was warmly welcomed by Janpal from Southall Community Alliance, who told her the story of the Western Road Urban Garden project. Apart from the GoodGymers, the allotment was visited today by volunteers Andre, Paul and Katie, with a brief cameo from Mr Bhasin.

Janpal likes to bring colour and vibrancy to Western Road. This season, he bought some dahlia tubers of many varieties, some of them named after cocktails and liqueurs like Cuba Libre and Crème De Cognac.

"What about crème de la crème?" - Andre asked.
"That's all our volunteers!" - Janpal replied.

The day was sunny, yet the cold wind made us think that the spring was not quite there. The first task was to bring the bags with soil from outside into the polytunnel, stir the earth and top it with compost. The dahlia bulbs would have much better chances of sprouting in the warmth of the polytunnel than outdoors.

With that job completed, the team: Zahra, Steph Ducat, Kash, Andre and Paul moved to another assignment: moving donated wood from next door's garden to the urban garden site. Sevan was receiving the planks handed over to him and putting them aside. With nails sticking out of the timber, and glass discovered in the grass at the boundary of the gardens, the task was abandoned as the safety of the volunteers was the priority, and not everyone had sturdy enough shoes to risk a cut.

When Lena and Marta arrived, they joined Zahra, Kash and Andre in planting the dahlias. The process involved soaking the tubers, writing variety names such as Tsuki-yori-no-shisha or Kennemerland on donated plant labels, and planting the bulbs. The Dahlia crew filled the soil bags with all 32 bulbs prepared by Janpal. Nice work!

Steph and Sevan returned to their ambitious task of splitting the massive tree stump which had been started last month. 28 days later the GoodGymers discovered the poor wedge still stuck between the stubborn wood and getting rusty at the top, where it had been repeatedly smashed and, as a result, had lost its protective coating. The two GoodGymers took turns hacking the stump and eventually released the wedge and gloriously split the wood. What a victory it was! Both pieces of the root were taken on a trolley and placed on top of the barrier made of logs like a trophy.

After the break, when Janpal's legendary hospitality was proven true (yes, there were samosas, drinks, biscuits and fruit!), Sevan and Steph moved on to a different job: preparing the soil at the community allotment plots. The session ended at 1 pm, and the volunteers were offered the produce to take home, this time: leeks.

We are looking forward to the late Springtime sessions at Western Road and seeing our dahlias' colours coming to life! Stay tuned for our next session at Southall's favourite urban garden. Next Saturday morning, we will be meeting for a dose of conservation work at Grove Farm Nature Reserve.