Fearing an exodus of regulars to the nearby Rothley 10k I need not have worried, numbers were boosted by first timer Carlos and the welcome return of Sam, Katy and Elaine.

Twas a lovely night if not a little humid. We set off on time for the 4k trek to Saffron Acres passing the mighty King Power Stadium and past the athletics stadium and eventually to task in an impressive time.

There were 3 tasks, weeding the strawberries, making a firm slab base for the new water butts and trimming a path into the woods for tractor access. The latter beat us! - Unbeknown to our task master the grass had grown to over waste height and with only shears provided it was an order too tall - we had a go but it was soon apparent that nettles, brambles and biting insects were to conspire against us so we focussed on the possible.

Lindsay, Sam, Jen and Katy made short work on the weeding whilst Frank and Elaine and Rachel and Carlos made up the two water butt teams.

There was meant to be sand, but sand there was none so we raided a bag of compost (that ponged a bit) to use as a base and after a bit of grass trimming and breaking up of the earth a suitable base was made. The teams went the extra mile by assembling the butts and seeing just waists and legs hanging out of the butts was actually quite comical.

The weeding team and Rachel moved on to a heavily weeded area and launched what could only be described as outright war. They had to be dragged away when our time was up.

On the way back we had two variations on Fartleks - for a mile it was the snake with back marker spriniting forward, then in turn it was each runners call to run fast for anything between 15 and 30 secs with everyone else keeping up.

Tonights photography in the absence of Mel was provided by Nicola who joined us directly at the task. She had a bit of a struggle to find us due to the one way system but thankfully got to us in the "Nic" of time to get some great pictures.