Another beautiful evening for a social community gardening session!

We were back at Saint Church in Leyton to continue laying down the woodchip path to make this wonderful green space accessible to more people. There are lots of greenery and woodland flowers and great trees - so good to spend an hour in this wonderful place.

On arrival we were offered a cuppa tea (always a nice way to start the task!) and then got stuck in with Clara and Mel shovelling the woodchip into wheelbarrows that Tony, Pippa and Rebecca were quickly moving to the path where Ama was raking it flat, later joined by Julia who also cleared the overgrown path from brambles and green alkonet to widen it!

A great workout and great community spirit! Well done everyone!!

Great to see new and old GGWF faces at tonight's run!

Everyone arrived on time, congregating inside in the warmth of the Greenleaf Road church (still very chuffed we have this wonderful base to use)! We were lucky again with a lovely starry evening, crisp and dry!

We started off with a warm up in the carpark, doing dynamic stretches to get our bodies warmed up and ready for what's to come:

Hills, Hills, Hills

It all started off gently enough jogging up to Forest Rd and then someone (coughs Matthew had an idea to run up a particularly steep road and we went for it! It was quite a mountain but everyone did a fantastic job persevering jogging and walking up and it felt amazing at the top (one might say just like climbing Everest, totally the same... :))! Yes it might've taken only a minute but the heart rate was up and running and there are some thoughts of hill training in the future!

Getting busy trimming bushes at St Peter-in-the-Forest

Lots was done at the session. Here's what we got up to:

• Gravelly duty: Tony, Matthew and Ercole got the wheelbarrows and walked to the Peterhouse community centre to bring 10 very heavy bags of gravel to spread it out on the paths! They then joined in the rest of tasks.
• Path covering: Ruby, Natasha and Charlotte were masterfully cutting up weed suppressant fabric and laying out, securing it with plastic pegs, using whatever was handy as a hammer! Great strong work!
• Weeding: The bed closest to the path was overtaken by grass so a few goodgymmers pulled out the grass with roots to make the area nice and tidy!
• Trimming bushes: We weren't planning on this but as we were looking around we noticed that the bushes by the entrance to the Remembrance Garden were quite, ahem, bushy so Pippa, Clara and Ercole got the secateurs from the shed and got to work - Edward Scissorhands, eat our heart out!

Celebrating Clara's 50th with muffins!

We took a gentler route back, finishing up with the nice stretch down and then celebrated Clara's 50th good deed with some banana and coffee muffins!