After the morning rain washed away all our hopes for good weather during the first group run of 2024, the afternoon wind blew away all the lime bikes on the streets and the confidence of our cyclists to make it to the task tonight. 🌬️ Was that enough to stop us? Of course not!

The wind calmed down just before the start time of our run, but runners Harvey, Sevan, Steph and Kash had another surprise on the way to William Hobbayne Community Gardens: a shower! 🌧️ At the destination awaited the West Ealing Wing Walking Brigade: Claire and Madhan, shortly joined by Milly and Mike.

Harvey organised tonight's task with June and Stuart from William Hobbayne Charity, who met us at the gardens. They had a surprise for us: a major, physical task in collaboration with Hanwell and Norwood Green Orchard Trail. We met Clive and Hillary from the group, who explained how they use parcels of derelict council land to transform them into a linked trail of public orchards with fruit trees everyone can harvest.

The Hobbayne Charity offered some of their land in the community gardens for the Orchard Trail operations. There was one problem: the space was full of bags loaded with twigs, wooden planks, pallets, soil bags and large pieces of a fence. A mammoth amount of things to move! Does that sound like a job for 8 GoodGymers on a Tuesday night? Oh, yes!

First, the whole group tackled the bags with branches and unloaded them at the other side of the community garden. Next came the larger calibre: the planks, then even bigger: pallets. The real Godzilla of the wooden objects to move was the unused fence.

While we love breaking things down, June thought the charity could reuse the fencing. We had to remove it from the space allocated to the Orchard Trail in one piece - or should I say - many huge pieces! The team invented a solution to lift those parts over another fence - the one still standing and blocking the way. That was where Mike's, Milly's and Steph's height came in handy! Some of us had to reverse during those manoeuvres, including Sevan, who fell into a vegetable bed 😮. Luckily, good karma saved him: he was at the task when we filled those beds with soil last year, which granted him a soft landing!

A few people from the team were redirected to a task to remove a tonne bag of soil. It was an opportunity for those not tall enough to be the stars of fence lifting but with power in their arms to shovel the soil into wheelbarrows or drive them to a pile outside the fenced area. Hauling the tonne bag with the remainder of the soil at the bottom concluded tonight's exploits of GoodGym Ealing and left the area clear and ready to use by Clive's and Hillary's group. It was a tremendous effort in just an hour and a remarkable result! Let's not forget the great workout and fun! 😁

We finished the night, heading to the Fox pub with June to celebrate our success, the start of the New Year and Kash's 600th good deed (a superb choice of a milestone task!).

Next week, we are running in the other direction: to Acton to help Cultivate London with bagging leaves for compost - sign up here!