This morning 10 of us gathered, with four mini litter pickers in tow, to join the Friends of Woolwich Common for their monthly litter pick. Such is the GoodGym community that several of us bumped into each other in Charlton Park - on that note, special welcome back to Ibrahim on your third task in a week! Seems like someone's got the GoodGym bug!

After gathering all the necessary equipment, we all headed off to different parts of the common, filling lots of bags of rubbish and a couple of dumped chairs and lots of chats along the way. Thanks to Robyn for sharing her snacks at the end! And to Ashton for pumping up my running buggy tyres. No excuse now!

On Wednesday we're back at Brooklands School for more soil shifting.

Until next time 😊

Rachel

A few weeks ago i made a meet up date to litter pick the woods in barnhurst we made 6 bags of litter

This morning Ashton joined the Friends of the Cray at Crayford on their mission to remove pesky Himalayan balsam plants along the river.

Why get rid of it? The plant erodes river banks and pushes out native species so it's a rather hostile invader!

Himalayan balsam spreads like fury by spraying out thousands of seeds from its flowers. So every year the race is on to pull up stems before they develop flowers!

This means scouring the banks from the water and from the land. The transparent stems are quite distinctive and with care they pull up easily with their roots attached, so it's a battle that's gradually being won year on year!

Had it was a lovely sunny in the afternoon i definitely said to myself i am going litter picking and did from my road to the bottom of park Crescent and then Victoria roaf then frazer road # good gym Bexley

Last night we had a special treat being joined by two people new to GoodGym Greenwich! Robert and Nadirah, it was great to have you with us and hope to see you again soon!

It being mental health awareness this week and the theme being 'community', we discussed the communities were part of that bring us joy. These ranged from GoodGym to reading clubs to running clubs and of course, Parkrun! We headed out for a run along the River which was lovely in the evening sun and found our way to Khai who was waiting patiently on our agreed what-three-words spot. We then made our way down tunnel avenue to find a good spot for some litter picking and quickly found one. And this wasn't an ordinary litter pick, this was an extraordinarily grim one and extra kudos to all of us for getting our hands properly dirty in this godforsaken part of Greenwich! But that's the beauty of our team- we make the best of it and we made a difference after just half an hour and over 10 bags and many trips to the dump.

We parted ways at this point and some of us run back to the naval college for a quick stretch.

On sunday we're helping out at the charlton house plant sale and next Wednesday we're back at Hervey Road for some gardening.

Until next time!

Rachel 😁