We woke on Saturday morning to heavy rain hammering down onto the Hammersmith & Fulham rooftops. A perfect morning for a GoodGym gardening mission... and our friends at the BBC Weather app seemed to think the rain was going to keep at it all morning.

The weather gods were clearly on our side as we each made our way to Miss I’s. The rain had stopped, and Jess & I went through Miss I’s and into her garden to have a look at what we were getting stuck in to this morning.

Miss I had a lovely bit of outside space, and she clearly knew her rake for her hoe, however she was struggling to look after her garden the way she once did. The garden was a mossy, weedy mess, and the lockdown winter had taken its toll. The mission was to get the garden tidied, and weed accepted it.

Miss I provided us with a plethora of garden tools and left us to it. First things first, we got stuck into the weeding. Both Jess & I were feeling quite educated about what was and what wasn’t a weed and we got stuck in to digging them out. We really wood lice to make the garden lovely again! At this point, Cookie arrived, ‘What thyme do you call this??’ we asked, as he grabbed a sack to bag up our weeds.

Between the three of us, we de-weeded the ground, the rockery and the walls, and tidied up the broken plant pots that the local cats and weather had caused chaos with. Cookie did a take with a rake and cleared the mossy weedy overgrowth from the lawn area; Jess did some lopping and chopping and I promise I was doing something useful too.

At this point, Miss I came out, and she was so very pleased with the difference we’d made. She had a second part to ask for the task, which involved lots of pots and plenty of plants. Around the garden, the empty plant pots needed some new life, so I had the job of repotting some lovely flowers and planting some herbs (see I did promise I was doing something useful).

Jess had a fight with a mass of roots in one plant pot to get her zinnia into its new home and Cookie got green fingered planting marigolds and petunias and pansies, and perfecting a salt-bae style fertiliser sprinkle. The rain had held off, and one of the neighbours (a cheeky cat) came to admire the change in the garden. It might have been a grey day, but we had really brightened things up.

We tidied up the final pebbles, and tried to get as much mud back onto the lawn from our trainers as able, when Miss I came back out. She was absolutely delighted with the change we’d made. The edging and stony area were so much neater, her plants had been repotted and would hopefully bloom beautifully as summer came, and the lawn was ready for fresh turf and grass to be laid. She thanked us for the grape job we’d done with a berry nice tray of fruit. Another good deed completed, weed managed to avoid the rain and weed got in one of our five a day!