I was excited to return to Dr A's this morning, following last month's mission there with Adam. I was joined on this occasion by the lovely Alice and Pippa, and I made sure to tell them in advance about Dr A's shed of GoodGym dreams, which contains pretty much every type of gardening tool you could ever want. To prove it, I even took some photos this time!

Dr A currently functions as a carer for his wife and doesn't get to work in his garden as much as he would like to. Because of this, his garden has become a little overrun, although a couple of GoodGym missions there have really started to make an impact: It felt very satisfying to walk into the garden and see the area we'd worked on last time still looking neat and tidy 😊

On arrival, we made our hellos to Dr A and he took us through to his garden to indicate the parts to be worked on today. As previously, he'd usefully identified just a couple of areas for us to work on so that we could see the impact we were making.

After Alice and Pippa were inducted into the shed of GoodGym dreams, we each selected our weapons: Alice and Pippa were going to start on trimming back some trees/shrubs, and so picked up some lopers, long-handled secateurs, and, of course, the amazing shredder. I was going to focus on getting some wild garlic out from between some flagstones, and so picked up something sharp and pointy (this is probably its common or garden name, rather than its Latin name). I also got to use a pretty cool kneeling pad that converted into a stool if you turned it upside down (no jokes, because a good kneeling pad should be held in reverence).

Jobs and tools selected, we got on with the tasks while Dr A helped, chatted and generally educated us on some of the different plants around, in addition to offering us coffee. Aside from having fun with the shredder (seriously, why don't more people have these?!), we also got pretty excited when the leaf blower came out to play: We now know to expect the unexpected recoil when a leaf blower is operated. Admittedly, this unexpected recoil would probably have been less unexpected if we'd stopped to think of Newton and his pesky third law. However, that's probably a bit much for a Sunday morning.

A couple of hours later, we'd made a good dent in both parts of the jobs (side note - I don't know if the smell of garlic will ever leave my hands). Hopefully we can return again soon to make some more inroads into the garden. I'd like to stress that this hope is not at all made more fervently because of the opportunity to play with even more tools from the shed of GoodGym dreams (Although maybe it is 😅)