This mammoth four hour mission was described as needing to plant 175 new trees on the side of the hill at Bath City Farm.

But we arrived to discover that 167 of those trees had already been planted by various other volunteers over the course of the weekend.

We were part of a bigger group of maybe a dozen or so people today, and we’re quit good at maths at GoodGym so quickly divided 8 by 12, for what looked like was going to be a big piece of cake!

Between us all we quickly got our measly 8 trees in the ground, then set about hammering stakes in alongside them, using the second best tool of the day: the stake-hammering-in-er-thingy, basically a massive heavy lump of metal you put over the end of the stake in order to pile-drive it into the ground. Very satisfying.

We then took a few minutes out to go and meet the baby goats…

I repeat - BABY GOATS!

…before returning to the tree mission, where we got to add ties to link stakes to trees, using the best tool of the day, the staple gun which would attach ties to stakes with the most satisfying mechanical thud you can imagine!

THUD!

We then got to attach cages around the trees in order to protect them from wildlife and/or farm critters. And going by the photo, the tree label tags may actually have been Sam's favourite item of the day..

Another lovely day out of the farm :)

Welcome

A warm GoodGym welcome to newcomer Natalie, who joined us on this mission.

Five of us headed down to the Batheaston Secret Garden to help give it some TLC. Despite the name, it seems pretty easy to find, and we all arrived there on time to be given the task of helping clear the, um, "less formal" area at the back of the garden including weeding and pulling up a whole lot of Lime Sedge which had taken over in parts. What transpired turned into a bit of a two Ronnies sketch...

"Have you got any Os?" asked Emily, in her best Ronnie Corbett accent

"I’ve got Ls, and some Hs" offered Meyrick, who doesn't always know his Rs from his elbow..

"No, hoes," exclaimed Emily, "hoes for weeding."

They didn't have any hoes, but there were various digging implements for us to use, with which most of us set about clearing the sedge. After trying various methods involving digging tools, the majority settled into a much more efficient system of brute-forcing it up in clumps with our bare hands, which meant we managed to clear the sedge in pretty good time.

That allowed us to start on clearing some Leylandii trees which were starting to talk hold, some maybe person-high already. Although their roots aren't actually that deep, this job definitely needed tools to help, so Jer took a fork and started trying to lever them out of the ground, before unfortunately snapping the end off his implement!

"Have you got four candles?" he enquired.

"No, but I've got a torch on my phone if that'll help?" offered James.

"No! Fork 'andles! Handles for forks," said Jer. "I've had an accident!"

"Did you need a P?" asked Meyrick, still stuck in the earlier part of this run report.

... anyways, in spite of the, err, questionably fictitious hilarity of this fun mission, we did manage to clear a large area at the back of the Not-So-Secret Garden, and finish up another really successful GoodGym mission, readying the site for the next work they’ll be doing there, and along the way we managed to build a really rather impressive "dead hedge" with all of our cuttings, which will apparently decompose down, and provide an excellent habitat for some of the local wildlife.

Warm welcome

A warm welcome to GoodGym first-timer Sam, who's probably read this far and is starting to wonder what sort of weird sitcom cult he's got himself into....