Well Miriam and I turned up in perfect timing to get just enough minutes of gardening with just about no rain!

We made use of our precious dry minutes to get weeds cleared from under windows and patio with that lovely scraping spade to concrete sound! Which I’m sure none appreciated but we could see the benefit after.

Miriam was handy with the lawnmower to get the grass cut right down and we brushed up so that we could see the patio we had uncovered before. We also uncovered first signs of spring with a rose flowering.

We also presented some excess soil to another building plant bed which was better than binning it. So in the end we did harvest 4 bags of weeds to give Miss J garden the January clearance required ready for the spring!

I have done a few sessions on Mr K’s garden and I’d been looking at the pictures with the pots at the edge of the lawn and thinking what might be nice is to plant some bulbs in them for some spring growth. I went to The Range in the morning and they had daffodil and crocus bulbs reduced so I snapped them up. The weather in the morning was wet and overcast so I was a bit worried it might be a washout. It cleared up at lunch and the sun even came out! I told Mr K about the bulbs and he was very grateful. I set about planting those first then I went to tackle the front paving. Mr K had his usual arsenal of fine tools which were perfect for the job. It was a great workout and Mr K seemed really pleased with the results. I can’t wait to go back in the spring and see if those bulbs have come through.

We safely teetered down the hill on our first snowy-icy session for 2026 with run leader Sallyann showing how to do it with abundant balance!

It still felt Christmassy with...

• a layer of ice under a dash of snow

• zero temperature

• northern light photaes with our crazy head torches (courtesy of our fab photoers Steph & Naser & Leonardo)

• also the Christmas chatterings of course!

It was lovely catching up with each other after the Christmas break.

Also we met some lovely new members Amani and Karen , of the amazing Siân noless.

Welcome, welcome and we hope to see more of you in 2026. We also welcomed our newly stolen member from Islington too Alison - yeah for us!

Elaine arrived and explained we had done such a good job on the nettles and thistles it was now time to tackle some of the floor covering weeds too hopefully to give some of the non-weeds a chance in the spring. Those floor covering weeds also included litter which always a joy to clear up!

Seven bags later we felt we had made a good start to 2026 and put to bed our last days of 2025.

Thank you all for turning up in the cold and giving that good doing warmth and I cannot wait to spend more of my 2026 doing good with you guys and guyettes xxx