I met up with Kash on a sunny Saturday evening and found her already planning the next day's shopping mission, making sure the shopping list was exactly what was wanted. When Kash and I arrived in Mr M's garden, our first thought was that there wasn't much to do here so the back garden must be wildly overgrown. As it turned out, Mr M had misplaced his back door key, so we were asked to weed the front garden instead.

Mr M was very friendly, offering us drinks to keep us going in the summer heat and bringing us some novel tools from his neighbour as his own were out of reach in the back garden. Our task was to attack the stringy mossy stuff that covered most of his front garden as well as the more common garden weeds. We gave him our sales pitch on what GoodGym does and it sounded like he'll ask for more help in the coming weeks.

Kash started by attacking the regular weeds with a hand spade to clear the most obvious invaders to the garden while I chose my weapon, a hoe with a sharpened end, to slice along the top surface of the soil to remove the regular moss and some more stringy moss type stuff. Kash soon joined in with another more exotic hoe, think squeegee but with a big sharp metal blade instead of the rubber!

We both got to work pushing our tools back and forward across the ground, which was surprisingly stony and is one of our excuses for why things took so long. It was deceptively hard work and an hour in, we took a break, looked at the garden and thought "is that all we've done?!" Kash proposed a change of strategy, focus on getting the largest area cleared rather than making a smaller area perfect. With that change in approach, we got back to hoeing and another hour later we'd cleared around 80% of the garden. Annoyingly, we started at opposite ends of the garden, me near the road and Kash next to the house, expecting to meet in the middle. As we didn't get rid of all the moss, we left a brown-green-brown flag in in the dirt which may or may not be the flag of a country.

The last problem we faced was how to take a photo of what we'd achieved. We took a photo of the garden and then needed to get creative with the tiny pile of moss (and a fair few stones) that it'd taken us 2 hours to scrape up. Cue some unusual photo angles and a forced "this is really uncomfortable" smile from me.

At the end of the task, Mr M was exceedingly grateful at the effort we'd put in and very pleased with the progress we made, even though there were still a few patches with visible weeds. we left with stooped backs but our upper arms had gotten a good workout.