Despite only being listed a few days ago, today’s community mission brought a generous gaggle of Goodgymers together to help the Friends of Ham Lands in their ongoing quest to create a welcoming natural habitat for animal, bird and insect life in the area of parkland between the river and Riverside Drive known as the Ham Lands.

It’s been a strange and disconcerting week for us all as we live in unprecedented times, so it was a welcome start to the weekend to get together with a smiling bunch of people and do some physical activity.

This week, we continued to work on an area we had visited before. We were welcomed by Sufiyo and the rest of the Ham Lands team, donned our hi-vis vests, and grabbed garden forks and rakes.

It’s hard work down on those Ham Lands. Some weeds have grown like extra tough spaghetti across the ground and, intermingled with even tougher ivy, they present a real challenge for a Goodgymer with a rake. But of course our attitude of “rake it till you make it” meant we were soon filling up the giant yellow sacks with weeds.

As usual, there were a few gnarly roots to grapple with. Nat played tug of war with one, while Andy, Lucy and Chris went to town with forks, spades and eventually a pick axe on another. They eventually got to the root of the problem and beamed with pride over their conquered foe.

All in all another satisfying session with the Happy HamLanders, and even the chance for Anita to gather some logs for the upcoming task to build an insect hotel at our 3 Pigeons flower bed - looking forward to that!