After a quick warm up of practicing picking up the trees and then throwing them onto the giant piles, it was time to set off to find some abandoned Christmas trees.

My group branched out a little too far and ended up separated after the first road. After searching high and low for abandoned trees it was soon time to head to out meeting point to be reunited.

Only 5 days later than last year and oh so many less trees!! We still relocated 12 Christmas trees to recycling piles at Hilly Fields. These Christmas trees will be used to make woodchip for our local parks.

It was also an evening on celebrations, it's 9 years that we've been doing good in the borough!! Happy 9th Birthday!

Our first group run back in 2025 and I was kind enough to put one of our hilliest and furthest tasks in the diary for this eve. It was that or we took the decorations down before Christmas and I am never ever suggesting that again - I don't think everyone is quite over that year yet.

Anyway, it was soon time to leave the warmth of Glass Mill and start our run over to Senior's. Upon arrival we found half our task had been kindly done for us and it was just a case of removing the decorations that required a ladder and taking down the trees.

It was a quick task and soon we were starting the run back to Glass Mill. Before we left, I did notice the Halloween bat had survived yet another taking down of decorations!

Double task night which meant we had a couple of people heading to Florence Green to tackle the watering and the rest of us heading to RUSS Community Housing to tackle the weeding. And a couple of us had just come from TRAID. We were helping so many wonderful organisations last night.

It was Lindsay's 50th good deed this evening. Congratulations, we can't wait to see you sporting that black tshirt soon!!

Onto the tasks both were a short run away. At Florence Green there was lots of watering the saplings.

At RUSS there was lots of heaving lifting! We had soil to shift, giant piles of weeds to shift and woodchip to shift but we got it all done and made excellent progress on the woodchip!

Vic and Sarah made excellent progress on the weeding except when it got too dark and they could no longer tell what was a weed and what was a small tree.

We then created my favourite group run photo ever which was unplanned and then some of us headed to Mamma Dough for some post-group run pizza!

Don't forget we have a lot of weekend sessions at RUSS if anyone fancies it.

It's also definitely head torch time of year now and I will be bringing the lights for outdoor tasks.

Everyone was excited for a group run to Luxmore Gardens without involving alkinet but also everyone was tired from the big half and music festivals. We slowly made our way up the hill to see just how much mulch awaited us.

On arrival at Luxmore we were met by the team with multiple wheelbarrows, plenty of tools and 2 giant bags of mulch.

It wasn't long before we got into a groove, loading the wheelbarrows, taking them down to the flower beds, raking the mulch around the plants and bringing the wheelbarrrows back.

A surprisingly quick amount of time later and both bags were empty!! Next time, we're going to have 3 bags to empty!