Inspired by shopping for a water butt, tonight's dilemma of the day was "What's your favourite vessel for drinking liquid?" It turns out everyone has a very specific mug, broken bottle or tankard, unless you're James for whom it's much more important that the liquid itself delivers after a tough week of work 🍷 Fair enough!

We split into two cohorts to get to our task - Cat led a longer run with Stephen as trusty backmarker, whilst Charlie and I took a stroll!

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Bark in the Dark...

Our task was at Cator Park, filling up barrows and buckets with woodchip at one end and ferrying it over to the new Tiny Forest at the other end. Maybe we should actually install a boat to carry it along the stream?

In what was apparently the final mulch run of the year, we got a solid 10+ barrows-full from the pile to the tiny trees.

The wee saplings will be much better protected from competing weeds now that it's knee deep in woodchip!

Ace work team, and don't forget to bring head torches next week 💡

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NEW LOCATION! 🎉 We headed to Churchfields Recreation Ground in west Beckenham for this session to meet Amanda, who leads a group aiming to make the park look a little nicer. Starting out from Bridge House, we first of all did our intros - this week's question, Which is your favourite bank holiday? (since we missed our Group Run last week). We had a nice spread - Easter, August Bank Holiday, May!

We took off east, unusually for us, and explored some new streets in Penge, crossing over Maple Road and the tram line to get to Churchfields Road, completing a cool 2.1km in the muggy evening air.

Amanda had a dream that the entrance to the park would look a lot more inviting with neatly edged paths, and the playground would be free of litter. GoodGym Bromley were only happy to make this dream come true, so we picked up tools from her well organised cart and got to work.

Fiona, James, David and I edged some paths, while Millie and Molly collected litter, with Catherine and Hannah tackling weeds using trowels.

As the light drew and the clock struck 8, we tidied up and enjoyed some flapjacks kindly provided for our hosts, then heading back via the main road to Bridge House for another 2km on the board.

Amanda was super pleased with our help and we're sure to return to Churchfields soon ❤️

Tonight we had another lovely sunset run / walk to the Crystal Palace water tower where John split us into two groups: one excavating the delicate clay pipes running around the perimeter of the water tower base and the other clearing away the last of the foliage towards the back of the base. We made some interesting discoveries as we cleared, including a massive spider and a decades old crisp packet which sadly still hadn't disintegrated :(

As ever, the conversation was varied - from race day strategies for the Big Half in two weeks' time to favourite sweet condiments (Maltesers spread is now firmly on my list to try!)

A sudden and unexpected rain shower brought our session to an abrupt end, but not before we'd made good progress with our tasks. Have included a couple of before and after photos with this post - excellent work team!

Anyone remember the 90’s TV ad?

I get a chick out of you

First up, we named ourselves and our favourite chicken-y thing from creme eggs to spatchcock to the rooster who’s been waking Catherine up all day!

We also welcomed Mohammed to the crew 👏👏👏👏👏 So great to have you with us.

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Our task was a brand new one for the folks at Dorset Road Allotment. They’ve got an old and overgrown chicken run which they want removed so that they can use the space for community activities.

We met Jaime and Ann from the committee who equipped us with tools from screwdrivers to bolt cutters to shears and we headed round to the chicken run.

It was huge. Harry was convinced something other than the nettles and brambles lived in there. 👹

We cracked on with various tasks:

✂️ Trimming back the nettles and brambles

🛠 Cutting the netting down and rolling it up

💪 Yanking off some big corrugated panels

📢 Moral support

It was kinda dangerous work but everyone got safely stuck in.

I think Mohammed won the prize for energy input! 🏆

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A half-dozen kilometres, some beautiful golden hour snaps from Cat, and a good deed in the bag.

Nice one team 💪

A fantastic four of us met this evening for some good deeding/weeding at a new task for us!

John, who helps out at Dacre Wood in Sydenham had a pretty mega job for us in the form of a very weedy cobbled path.

Luckily he had just the tools for the job and we cracked on slicing and pulling to get the weeds out of the cracks.

Say crack again.

The team did a cracking job and we cleared the main entrance path. Just a few more sections to go back for another time.

Nicely done everyone 😊

It was also nice to jog past the beds that GoodGymer Tim used to look after. They are still looking beautiful. He would be proud.