This morning I met up with Jaya and Sarah for a mission in Southwark for Mr and Mrs J.

Mr and Mrs J are very frail, and find that they can't do as much in their garden as they used to. Their immediate family live a bit too far away to come over frequently enough to help with the garden. GoodGym were asked if we could help with this by removing some weeds.

Mrs J, being slightly more mobile than Mr J, showed us to the back garden when we arrived. She had a fully stocked shed that was very representative of their previous gardening routine. I was personally very glad to see that we wouldn't be fighting over tools to use! 😉

Initially, Jaya started on weeding the patio while Sarah and I set about tackling some weeds that had sprung up near the shed, as they were blocking access to the rest of the (large!) garden.

While we worked, we talked about some of the usual GoodGym topics. Having never met Sarah and Jaya before, I was surprised that they also hadn't met each other previously: For some reason, having seen their names on lots of run reports, I'd just assumed that the likelihood of none of us knowing each other was minimal. However, this just meant that we had lots of fresh topics to discuss 😍

Of these, my favourite topic involved the colloquial name of one of the weeds we were pulling up (sticky willy) and whether or not the spores from them that were attaching themselves strenuously to our leggings could be called "sticky willy balls". Regardless, they got everywhere! I insisted on taking lots of photos of them, so that everyone could see exactly how spored to death we were. I only realised afterwards that taking closeup photos of people's leggings is perhaps not the most normal thing to do on first acquaintance 😅 Oh well 🤷

After an hour or so, Jaya headed off while Sarah and I carried on for a second hour. In total, we filled 12 brown sacks of garden waste (or 1 bin and 9 sacks (aka 4 hypothetical bins), depending on the volumetric measure you prefer). In doing so, we removed some patio weeds (Jaya's pet project), uncovered a path (my pet project), and freed a couple of rose bushes (Sarah's pet project).

Mr and Mrs J were grateful for what we'd done for them in the couple of hours we were there. There's obviously a lot more to do now that more of the garden has been opened up by our work today, so hopefully that can be part of a follow-up mission! 😄

It was great working with you guys - hopefully see you on a Camden group run soon! (Now that I've sold it to you with the weekly pub trip 😄)