The leafs have leaft the Josiah Braithwaite Community Garden thanks to the hard work of GoodGym H&F

Tonight there was the 'great debate' on ITV, at GoodGym H&F however, our great debates tend to be around 'weed or not a weed?' and the big questions in life such as 'what is your favourite pudding and what animal would you rather be?' - I feel we do a good job at putting the world to rights!

Despite the noticeable cooler temperature due to a cold front from the North Pole*, 14 other GoodGym'ers joined me for tonight's task at the Josiah Braithwaite Community Garden.

Big welcome to our new runner tonight, Rosie who joined us for her first GoodGym H&F group run - thank you for coming along, hope you enjoyed it! And great to see Analiese (our new token Kiwi!) back for her second run.

With everyone layered up and ready we headed outside for our news round-up and warm-up...

Some pro-leaf-ic running...

We started off the evening by first congratulating our Fulham 10k runners...Lucy, Jonny, Alice and Arba. Well done all and congratulations Alice on the new PB!! 🙌🏼🥳

We also congratulated Tom on his tough Maverick Trail race, one of those 'flat' races with a brutal 217m of elevation!

In other news...

1. H&F Community Mission - Thursday 12th December for Age UK H&F's Christmas Party. Please sign up here if you can lend a hand anytime between 4pm-8.30pm.
2. GoodGym have teamed up with food poverty charity FareShare and Tesco to help people struggling with hunger in a series of community missions. There's one happening in Wimbledon Metro on Saturday 23rd November. For all the details, click [here].
3. GG Training Run - 13 Bridges Battersea - Tower - Sunday 24th November. All the details are here.
4. FoodCycle, East Acton - Volunteer to cook community meals from surplus foods. All the details are here - if interested, speak to Cookie and he can make it a Community Mission!
   

Leaf it out!

Before we headed off on our run we had a quick warm-up comprising of some high knees, jumping jacks, spotty dogs, lunges and some perfectly executed side-to-sides, both clockwise and anti-clockwise! With everyone nicely warmed up we headed off through the busy streets of Hammersmith up towards Shepherd’s Bush, pausing briefly for the beloved wall sit en route.

Matt, Tom and Andrew kindly continued on up the road to distribute about half a dozen leaflets for Open Age H&F, a charity which provides hundreds of weekly activities for local residents aged 50+ to sustain their physical and mental fitness, maintain an active lifestyle and develop new and stimulating interests - the good news is we'll be distrubuting more of these leaflets next week!

As it was a good few degrees colder than of late we had a nice brisk run up and it wasn't long before we'd weaved our way round pedestrians and zig-zagged through the streets to reach the Nubian Life Centre. In perfect synchronisation, we arrived with Matt, Tom and Andrew who appeared in the darkness from the opposite direction.

Read it and sweep!

We entered into the Josiah Briathwaite Community Garden, part of the Nubian Life Centre, and were greeted by the lovely, Susannah. The Nubian Life Centre provides adult day care services for the Afro-Caribbean community with health issues such as Dementia and Alzheimer's and Susannah explained that the garden was used by the elders at weekends to grow organic and medicinal food, and as a safe space for children to explore and find all the bugs!

Susannah went on to give us an interesting gardening lesson around the benefits of green manure and the permaculture principles to restore fertility and nitrogen to the soil, and the Gardeners' World visit last year - check it out here.

Tonight's full list of tasks to be done that Susannah ran through with the group were:

• Planting green manure 🌱
• Sweeping the patio and paths 🧹
• Removing and cutting up the old climbers ✂️
• Raking and collecting all the leaves from the grass 🍂
• Fixing up the new signs for the garden 🔨

Green manure planting that's a cut above the rest

Matt and Marissa got stuck into the garden bed with the assistance of some secateurs to cut the dead plants. Eloise, Tom and Andrew worked together to remove and cut up the dead climbers from the dead garden bed and began the planting of the green manure.

A clean sweep

Opting for the brushes were Rosie, Analiese and Johnny who teamed up to give the paths and patio a good sweep, with Johnny taking on the important role of bag holder in Sarah's absence.

Rake that leaves

Lucy, with her new found love of the rake, systematically raked the garden and formed many a piles of leaves that Andrew and Tom efficiently collected and bagged using the 'handy' hand-scooping tool. Cookie ensured the new signs for the garden were securely put up, while Alice and Sarah got fully stuck into the garden beds, meticulously combing through the plants to remove all the leaves that had fallen, forming yet more piles of leaves!

With the time coming to call it a night, everyone finished up with their jobs, piled up the 5 bags of leaves and garden waste, and branched out for a team photo around the tree. Susannah was incredibly appreciative of the teams hard work and efforts to get the entire list of jobs completed as they have a visited from their funders tomorrow - what good timing for a GoodGym style garden makeover!

Check out the transformation!....

We said our final thankyous and goodbyes and began our run back to base. En route back we bumped into two familar faces in GG tees, Jonny and Mo, who earned their good deed by delivering the final Open Age H&F leaflet. Back at base, Mo kindly led the cool down and stretch off before everyone headed home to the warm! Great job team. Amazing work as always!

Next week we're we're leafleting and postering for two local charities, Open Age H&F and Food2You. Please sign up here. Have a great rest of your week and weekend. Hopefully see you next week!

*according to the Metro, other newspapers are available!