What a night of celebration we have tonight as 15 goodgymers, old and new, join to take on the task at the community orchard.

Firstly we welcome our 2 new runners, welcome to the Cardiff crew Evie and Simon.

CROESO

Then we had our pre-celebration for a very special birthday for Llion, followed by a night of fun celebrations at the flyte club.

Penblwydd hapus

After initial greetings and chats, we set off the walkers first on a slightly shorter and quicker route, before Lucy led the runners off through the park on a different route. We had the return of our water rolling barrel baddies, the bowsers, which allowed us to transport 80 litres of water in total at a time. Michael ran with them initially, until we hit the park and then the running challenges could begin. Each runner took a turn of running with a single bowser, and this certainly engaged the concentration as those contraptions had a mind of their own at times.

Our first stop along the way was at the cricket changing rooms, where the outside tap was situated. we picked four people to stay back and fill up the bowsers, whilst the rest ran over to the orchard to meet up with the walkers. Michael gave a quick briefing on the tasks, and a quick overview of the orchard project - which was really looking well settled on just its second year.

We had a couple of tasks tonight, so we split the group up to tackle them,

• running the bowsers back and forth to get filled
• watering the orchard
• collecting seeds from a couple of plants

Michael handed out brown envelopes for the seed collecting, and showed everyone which plants we were collecting from and how to get the most seeds. Our plants of choice were foxgloves and honesty.

Did you know?

The Welsh for foxgloves is "Ffion", remember that next time you meet someone with that name. Other translations are "bysedd y cŵn" and "Maneg Ellyllyn".

After a good half an hour of running back and forth, collecting seeds and Michael eating blackberries from the bushes like a feral animal, it was time to collect everything together, including ourselves, take a group photo and head back. Michael had to leave us at this point to drop off the bowsers at another location so that he could then join everyone for the birthday celebrations and darts.

Thanks to everyone for coming, expect some foxglove planting sessions in the orchard next year thanks to all of the seeds collected.

What a celebration, goodgym CYMRU, we hit our EIGHT anniversary. Starting back on May 23rd, 2017, running to a community garden space, and here we after 8 years running to one of our regular community growing spaces Global Gardens.

We are very proud of how many community green spaces we have helped over those 8 years, and hope to continue the fight to keep Cardiff as green as possible.

Our groups tonight had cyclists, walkers and runners all making their way to Global Gardens. It was a great run through the park, a great way to spend our celebration run before the weather changes. Michael had both his goodgym and global gardens hat on tonight, as he got everyone into the site and ready to volunteer. Although the weather was due to change, there was still plenty of watering to do. The polytunnel needed a good soaking, as did plenty of potted new plants that were dotted around. We also had a second group tooled up and ready to get back to the removal of brambles and bindweed, people on wheelbarrow duty to run the weeds back and forth to the designated compost pile.

We had some returns tonight as we welcomed back Benjamin and Lucy, with the lovely baby Eliza and goodgym bunny. (is this a new mascot?)

After 30 minutes of volunteering (and baby holding), we were done and it was time for our group photos. We made our plans for afterwards to continue the celebrations with a few drinks and some food, and a catch up with each other.