This morning I reunited with Katie (🎉) to tackle another overgrown garden in Islington. We’d each tried to fit in some fitness en route, with Katie choosing to run to the mission (“It’s mostly downhill”) while I’d stopped off mid-commute to jog with another GoodGymmer, and so were feeling virtuous before we’d even started!

For today’s gardening mission, we were lined up to help the lovely Mr P. Mr P’s garden has become steadily more overgrown as his arthritis has progressed. His family live a distance away and they've had to prioritise other tasks when they've visited. He’d previously had some gardening help from GoodGym, and was keen to see if we could assist him again.

We knew in advance that there were likely to be a lot of brambles involved in this mission. This is because most gardening missions are briefed as being “weeding with maybe a side of brambles” while this mission was described as simply “brambles”.

Now, there were some weeds on this mission, but I don’t think you can go too far wrong by characterising this mission as simply “brambles”. The only real deficiency with this description is that the term “brambles” does not truly convey the scope of the brambles we fought on this mission. We faced the whole gamut of bramble types, from thin, weedy ones with needle-like spikes to fat ones with pernicious barbs. They came with roots that had no business being as large as they were: one root even managed to break a trowel and threatened to do the same to another! They came to defend their territory against the GoodGym interlopers with the loppers.

In the end, we were able to defeat them with minimal injury simply by using secateurs to both cut and carry small sections of the brambles to the waiting green waste bags. It turns out that if you don’t allow them to come anywhere near your person, they can’t actually stab you. (Who'd have thought?!) I applied the same technique to moving worms out of the way (except using a three pronged cultivator), and can confirm that I did not suffer any worm-related injuries using this technique 👍

Katie was a little unlucky in that she’d opted for three quarter length capri pants and brambles can sense this type of weakness in a person. After the first few stabs, we knew that she (or at least her legs) would be toast if she kept on being scratched by them, so I commandeered the job of standing on top of the green waste bags to compress the brambles down. This meant that at least she only had to worry about the in situ brambles.

Three hours of de-brambling and de-weeding later, we showed the result of our work to Mr P. He seemed very happy with what we’d been able to get through in the time, although we think there’s still scope for a return mission here. We chatted with him for a few more minutes before making our goodbyes, and enjoyed seeing both some of his previous repurposing projects and his cat (inner-me: cat! 😍😍😍) Hopefully our work today in Mr P's garden will make the outside a bit safer for him to enjoy 😄