On a grey spring Saturday afternoon Joanna and Beth visited Mrs J to help her dig out her flowerbed. After introducing ourselves at the front door Mrs J warmly welcomed us in and led us both outside to the garden where she pointed out the forget-me-not weeds in-amongst one of the flowerbeds and the flowerbed she wanted to “spruce up”.

Mrs J asked us if would could kindly clear all the weeds and roots in the flowerbed and provided us with a fantastic array of gardening tools in order for us to accomplish this; along with two large bin bags which at the time we thought would be plenty! – it wasn’t long before we were unravelling the large roll of additional bin bags. Jo had confidently declared at the beginning that it wouldn’t take us long to de-weed and de-root the ENTIRE flowerbed and that she reckoned we could complete it all “in about half an hour”, Mrs J was less optimistic and she was right to be. Once we had put the fork into the ground and begun to dig deeper down in the soft soil it was quickly evident that this was not going to be as quick as first thought by Jo!

The flowerbed used to be grassed and amongst the soil there were many roots systems that had very much made themselves at home with many not on board with the plan of being easily pulled up. However, we both persisted until they succumb to our strength (…well with the slight help of the garden fork and hoe – to quote Beth “I do love a hoe”!) and many emerged with the most impressive long and spindly root systems.

The sun made a welcome appearance, and amongst our de-rooting and de-weeding we had some lovely chats between us about marathons, half marathons, GoodGym, running and our other activities that didn’t include running, with much childish humour interspersed as always!

Time had flown by, and with many more weeds and root systems cleared and bagged up we declared the flowerbed to (almost!) be just how Mrs J had wanted it to look so she could plant her lovely and bright Wilkinson’s bulbs, as recommended to her by her old neighbour. Mrs J began sorting the bulbs and movingly spoke about how her husband used to lovingly tend to their garden, but since he had passed it hadn’t received much attention due to her reduced mobility; she was very excited for the bulbs to be planted and to invite her neighbours round in the summer when they had flowered, “it will be lovely to get the garden back again and to show it off” she enthusiastically declared.

We finished removing the last few roots, did one final turn over and raking of the soil, before declaring the job done for today. Mrs J was very impressed at what we had managed to achieve in a short period of time and thanked us numerous times for all our help, we of course returned the thanks.

Our last job was to move these eight deceptively heavy bin bags (turns out weeds, root systems and stones can be quite the dead weight) to outside her front door which we managed without injury! A successful few hours, mission accomplished! We then had a brief final chat on the doorstep with Mrs J about weekend plans before we said our goodbyes and began our runs home via a ‘quick’ stop in the pub. Mrs J’s final words of wisdom to us both were “don’t get drunk!”, wise words indeed…