It was a bumper turn out at this week’s task as 11 Nottingham GoodGymers headed to the Meadows Foodbank and Pantry. Mark greeted us on arrival and, once he found his to-do list, he set us to work on a variety of tasks.

Dayna and Elspeth took on the task of sorting and tidying the clothes in the foodbank. Matt, Bozena, Rafe, Nigel, Rosemarie and Vytautas did a huge clean of the floors, shelves and fridges. Meanwhile Peter, Tom and Rachel headed upstairs to tackle a flat pack Ikea table and a clothes rail.

As some of these jobs proved quicker than others, a few of the group then turned their hand to dating some of the food, and photographing and cataloging some toys and baby items which are going to form part of the foodbank’s Christmas campaign (see information poster in photos). Finally, as if we hadn’t ticked off enough different activities this evening, Nigel took on the important job of folding bits of paper for the foodbank’s raffle which was due to be drawn in the coming days.

We welcomed Rafe to his first GoodGym session, and also Elspeth who has recently moved to Nottingham from Leeds where she used to do GoodGym.

Also congrats to Dayna who has now done 10 tasks, and a big well done to Bozena who did the Robin Hood Half Marathon at the weekend!

Five GoodGymers headed to the Edwards Lane Community Centre in Sherwood recently to help out with tidying their garden and grounds. This was our first visit to the centre, which is home to the Chayah Development Project, and we were warmly greeted on arrival by Hya, Chayah’s Founder and CEO.

Our main task was to mow the lawn at the front of the building, a job which had Matt’s name written all over it. We all held our breath while Matt and Hya’s husband attempted to get the mower started, but once it was up and running it was full steam ahead as Matt attempted to mow the lawn before the light faded.

Meanwhile, Leah, Peter, Nigel and Rachel did some general pruning, weeding and tidying of the area around the carpark and driveway (Nigel is missing from our group photo as he needed to make a dash to the airport for a pick-up).

We very nearly completed this task in the daylight, but as the sun started to go down just before 7.30 the mower also ran out of petrol. There wasn’t time to refuel and so a small patch of grass remained un-mowed for the time being. However, this was still a job well done and we hope to return to the community centre for some indoor tasks over the darker weeks.

A big thank you to Hya, her husband, and to Councillor Nayab Patel who also came out to support us.

GoodGym Nottingham recently decided to mark various milestones within the team with a task and pub quiz combo.

The group congregated at the Carlton Hill Sensory Garden (Garden for the Blind) to do a spot of tidying and litter picking. We had expected to pick up where we left off last time and get stuck into more of the overgrown bushes, however someone had beaten us to it and the garden was actually looking very clear and tidy. Leah managed to find one patch which still needed a bit of a prune, whilst the rest of the group split up and looked for litter and anything else that needed a little chop.

The group did still manage to fill a bag of cuttings and get quite a bit of rubbish from the surrounding streets, so it was still time well spent.

After the task, we headed to the nearby Brickyard Pub to eat pizza and do the pub quiz where we placed fourth. Not too shabby, although we have realised that our knowledge of James Bond themes and Thomas the Tank Engine needs work.

And the award for most delayed report goes to…

Anyways! Six of us head to Arkwright Meadows Community Gardens again for a slightly cooler evening of gardening.

This time we were tasked with clearing a big patch of nettles as well as clearing bindweed from a couple of the beds. As the quote from Nigel in the title suggests, this was a bit trickier than our normal "smash and dash" approach to weeding. Katie from the gardens explained to us that the bindweed roots go incredibly deep and incredibly far, but you need to get the whole thing to stop it coming back. There was a lot of digging around and delicately pulling the whole thing out to keep us busy for an hour.

Shoutout to Tom for hitting 99 good deeds!!!