“Are you here for the cake decorating?” was the somewhat unexpected greeting as GoodGym arrived at St. John’s Church Birkby last night. GoodGym had actually been booked to help clear the community garden there, but we are willing to turn our hand to anything, and if our talents can be employed in a little cake decorating (and hopefully eating!) we would of course been more than happy to oblige.

Perhaps unfortunately it turned out all to be a simple misunderstanding, and whilst the cake decorating class commenced in a nice warm church, we were left to our intended task outside in the Birkby Roots Community Garden. On the upside GoodGym friend and Birkby Community Lynchpin Jason had turned up with a van load of tools to enable us to do the job.

Not so many GoodGymmers last night, just 5 for the 2.5K run along the Birkby Bradley Greenway to the church. As we ran past groups of young men gathered around the greenway’s benches it soon became apparent that the vegetation we would be digging up in the Community Garden wouldn’t be the only weed we would encounter that evening!

5 motivated GoodGymmers plus Jason can still get quite a bit done and we were soon working away with spades and forks scraping away the accumulated grasses and weeds from the small garden area. The garden itself is part of the St. Johns Aspire project which enables older people in the area to connect with the local community, but they are currently slightly short of volunteers to keep it maintained, hence GoodGym’s input. 45 minutes and 4 big bags of weeds later we were done, whilst the job was by no means entirely finished we had managed to clear a good chunk of the garden and as usual enjoyed a good chat whilst doing so.

Saying farewell to Jason we set forth for the run back to the Stadium, and whilst we’d neither had our cake or eaten it on this occasion, we had at least done another job for the local community. Thanks to last night’s GoodGymmers, Kati Law, Ben Godfrey, Zena Whalley and Wendy Redmile.