After some fancy footwork online to get all of us in the loop about our Mission location today, Lucia, Samia and myself met in the white heat of Walworth for some gardening. It was the afternoon of the GoodGym Olympics 🏅 across town, but we were here - these deeds won’t do themselves. 😉

Following a knee operation, our host was unable to tend to her garden, so some GoodGym help was just what she needed… She had a decent amount of tools but only one set of shears, and cutting was mostly what needed to be done. Consequently our host’s granddaughter and I set-off down the street borrowing tools from various of their kind neighbours. We managed a mower from one direction, and some loppers from the other. Now we had three pairs of GoodGym hands, and three sets of cutting tools.

Whilst our host’s great-granddaughter, a cheerful little tot ran laps up and down the garden path, we gathered-up the dead grass and pulled many of the weeds by hand; readying the ground for the mower. After daisy-chaining several trailing sockets to get enough length to reach the whole garden, we kicked the thing into action. It saved us plenty of time, but regrettably there were so many stones around, and leery of damaging the nice neighbour’s mower, we eventually went back to our previous more low-tech approach (not to mention, the grassy dust it produced was causing us all to sneeze like nutters 😖)

A last-minute addition to our remit was to cut back several of the large verdant shrubs at the back. Lucia sculpted them with the shears, whilst Samia and I collected and bagged-up the waste.

5 bags of leaves and grass later, and probably a few shades more tanned (hopefully that and not burned), we were off on our way.