34 do-gooders mulched for Kings Cross Orchard project, weeded for the Camden Butterfly Trust and ran between 5-8km

This week we welcomed four new people along - Christina, Freya, Emily and Morag - nice to meet you guys!

In the news this week:

• There is GoodGym Monthly Drinks tonight At the Star of Kings. Wonderful features include International Pun of the Month!
• We are taking on Regents Park 10km this Sunday, come and join us!

Tonight we had two tasks, one with Alara WholeFoods and the other with the Butterfly Society.

Alara Run Report:

After an active warm up we headed to Alara (although with an extended as PB ran the wrong way despite going to Alara like 74 times!), upon our arrival we met Vlad and were given the following tasks for the evening:

• Weed around the gooseberry plants - Becky and Polly did a cracking job with this!
• Water the plants in the greenhouse and the yacon plants - Frances, Isabel and Vadmi did a great job!
• The big task of the evening was mulching one of the orchard's, this involves first weeding around the trees, then laying cardboard (with no stickers on) under the trees and finally putting compost on the top of the cardboard. This process which 20 of us were involved in would have taken the Alara team a long time to do, perhaps 8 hours, but we cracked it in 30 minutes - well done team!

Mulching on!

After collecting a free box of muesli from Vlad we headed to on the canal to get a run in on a lovely summer evening. Our running fundamental focus of the evening was feet, we want them pointing straight forward and not pronating like penguins! Running with good form makes us more efficient and prevents injuries!

We did a lovely out and back along the canal, followed by meeting up with the Butterfly crew for some stretches and a trip to the pub!

Butterfly report by Pritesh:

With our last visit to help the Camden Butterfly Trust (check out their snazzy new website, we had seven of us taking the 4k trip to Belsize Park. Though Chris has found us a route that avoids the particularly steep inclines it’s still a tough run but we kept a good pace and made our way ready to get working to help the local butterflies.

Steep Inclines

We were met by james who outlined what we needed to do. We bagged up a big heap of weeds and detritus, we weeded, raked and generally worked over the ground that the Camden Butterfly Trust will be working on to replant with butterfly friendly plants. With extra tools brought along this week we worked hard for 25 minutes and managed to get everything bagged up and cleared a large portion of the area!

Bags and bags

With our work done and some arty pics taken (see our results on twitter ) we headed back to base and tried out a new route that took us along the canal for a short period and then back to Somers Town. We arrived just as the Alara group arrived and had a good stretch down.

Next week we are off to do gardening for Cecil Sharp House and painting for Abbey Community Centre, sign up here.

PB out.