13 GoodGymers helped tackle a bed of nettles in Fulham Palace Gardens

On a rather damp and grey Saturday morning, 13 wonderful GoodGymers met in Bishop's Park to lend some volunteer power in Fulham Palace gardens. A few had joined following another big and busy, Fulham Palace parkrun, while others had run, walked and cycled to our meeting point at the Bothy in Fulham Palace gardens - the shelter used to store all the gardening tools at Fulham Palace.

Too much of a good sting

One of the Fulham Palace Trust volunteers, Chris welcomed the group at the Bothy and explained today's task was to remove some nettles for composting. The GoodGym team wheeled across the wheelbarrows filled with shears, forks and spades to the very nettly part of Fulham Palace gardens where the shear size of the task was revealed.

Chris explained that the nettles, 'urtica crescet myrtus' in Latin, spread and grow quickly and were now overruning the area and needed to be removed. They needed to be dug up at their roots and then cut down in the large gardening bags so that they could be composted on a bed that reached around 50 degrees!

Everyone tooled up and began the battle against the nettles. Luckily for us, Matt 'in a hat' Nash for whom it never rains on a GoodGym task...and so it appeared to be the case again as the weather man changed the rain to beautiful sunshine!

Shear brilliance

Katie, Matt, Jade, Hannah and Jenny did a chop notch job in chopping all the nettles that were being dug up ✂️.

The digger picture

Aine, Analise, Anthony, Annabel and Drummond made the nettle removal look like a fork in the woods as they all efficiently removed and shuttled across the dug up nettles to the large gardening bags.

Rolling with it

As Tom, Matt and Chris worked on a wonderful roll of nettles as they went the roll nine yards with Chris approving of it with a celebratory jump.

Pogo a-go-go!

Beth swapped a fork for a spade and used it very much like a pogo stick in order to break through some tough and thick roots that still remained.

They spade this one up

In removing one tiny nettle, the mightiest of them all, Katie had managed to bend her shears so tried a variety of things to bend them back...she tried standing them, bending them against a tree and then asked Tom to help with the force of a few spade hits...

...and eventually they were back working! Hooray! 🙌

A nettle of honour

After 90 minutes of hard graft that tested our nettle the team had filled up 2 large gardening bags full of chopped up nettles. Check out the transformation...

Thank you all very much for coming along and for all your efforts tackling the nettles!

It was absolutely fabulous to welcome some new faces to GoodGym and some tourists from Croydon and Lambeth. Hopefully see you all again soon 😊.

GoodGym will be helping out the Fulham Palace Trust volunteers on the last Saturday of every month with a variety of tasks! Sign up for March's session here.