This morning we ran (not very far at all) to help Good Food Matters in New Addington!

What a beautiful morning it was to head up to New Addington Good Food Matters Community Food Learning Centre.

The Learning Centre aims to work with the community to help connect people to the food they eat and how it is produced. They teach the community the invaluable skills of growing and cooking with sustainably produced food and are aiming to give better access to affordable healthy produce to the local community. You can read more about what they do in their blog

The centre is based on a 1.5 acres bio-diverse green space with a large eco-built, fully equipped, accessible to all, teaching kitchen, two large traditional, wooden traditional greenhouses and an amazing world food polytunnel. The bio-diverse area has an apiary, six bee hives, a pond and hundreds of bee and wildlife-friendly plants. The whole site is surrounded by native hedging thanks to The Woodland Trust.

We met with the founder Evelyn and some of the other volunteers including David and Amanda. Today’s task was helping prepare the beds for the growing seasons. This involved forking over the soil to help pull out the unwanted grasses and digging trenches in straight lines which would make it easier to plant and harvest the crops. Luckily for us David had already marked out the paths for us to dig along otherwise I think they may have become meandering pathways!

Waitrose are writing an article about Good Food Matters for their magazine and we were snapped as we worked – obviously if we’d known then lipstick might have been worn and I’d have tried to do something with my hair! We had to sign waiver forms which described as “models” - that made our day. We will be keeping a look out for the article over the next few months and see if we can spot our GoodGym t-shirts

Today’s session saw two new members Lorraine and Karen - a big GoodGym welcome to them and hope to see you both again soon either at runs, on Missions or as Coach runners.

The time slipped away from us a little today what with the digging, modeling and chatting so the fitness session was reduced to walking briskly back to the centre for the most delicious homemade lunch prepared by Evelyn and served by two very cute children who’s names I didn’t catch. We are hoping to get the recipe for the ginger cake and I’d also love the pistachio cake I’ve had from Evelyn before.

So the clocks “spring” forward tonight which means more daylight for our tasks on Tuesday evenings – so don’t forget to sign up.

On Tuesday we will be heading back to Saffron Central to met Ally and see what we can do to help – it’ll be gardening related.