On a gorgeous Saturday morning Judith and Beth visited Mr J to help him weed and tidy up his garden. After introducing ourselves at the front door Mr J warmly welcomed us in and encouraged us to make ourselves feel at home. We duly obliged and sat on one of his sofas as he explained to us what he needed help with and why he needed help in his garden – he’d recently had a traumatic fall so was unable to weed or tidy the garden himself. He movingly spoke about how his wife used to lovingly tend to their garden, but since she had passed it had taken on its own lifeform due to his lack of interest in gardening! Last year he had a membrane put down that was supposedly meant to eradicate weeds, however, a year had passed and they had begun to take hold again.

Following our chat with Mr J he then led us both outside to the garden where he pointed out some beautiful trees that attracted both the blackbirds and the bees – thanks to Judith’s brilliant bright yellow and quite the ‘bees knees’ attire she was also subject to a couple of bees interest throughout the task and did a great job of dodging them! Mr J asked us if would could kindly clear all the weeds and dead plants in his garden and provided us with a fantastically stocked bucket of gardening tools in order for us to accomplish this; along with two large bin bags which at the time we thought would be plenty! – it wasn’t long after before Judith was asking Mr J for additional bin bags.

As time passed we both realised there was an overwhelming onion smell and upon closer inspection we realised that many of the plants were not weeds as such but spring onions which had thrived in the soil that was placed down on the membrane. They had very much made themselves at home with many not on board with the plan of being pulled up. However, we both persisted until they succumb to our strength (…with the slight help of the garden fork!) and many emerged with the most impressive long and spindly root systems that we were in awe of. The sun was shining, and amongst our weeding and spring onion tussle we had some lovely chats between us about half marathons, GoodGym, running and our other hobbies that didn’t include running! Time flew by, and with many more weeds, spring onions and dead plants - one of which the roots resembled a dodgy 80s hair style - cleared and bagged up we declared the garden to be tidy, de-weeded/onioned and just how Mr J had wanted it to look.

Mr J looked round his garden and was impressed at what we had managed to achieve in a short period of time. He thanked us numerous times for all our help, and we of course returned the thanks.

Our last job was to move these deceptively heavy bin bags (turns out weeds and spring onions can be quite the dead weight) to outside his front door which we just about managed without injury! We then had a brief final chat with Mr J about his hip and the Saturday night fight he was hoping to listen to before we said our goodbyes and began our runs home. A successful few hours, mission accomplished!