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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Back at Beckenham Green, and as we head into autumn fallen leaves were starting to stack up. With 4 GoodGymers ready to roll, we were assigned sweeping duty, and we hurtled through it 👊

First Leaonie and I collected the debris by the fence near the M&S corner, with Kelly starting work near the planters and joined by Ria. We then all moved up to the planters and brought the leaves down to our big pile, which was thrown behind the fence into the nature trail to start rotting down and provide good food for the plants there.

Having smashed that out in 50 minutes, we proceeded to remove some weeds from the planters and help install some wanted, propagated plants to fill in the gaps.

A lovely team and a fun task - thanks for making it a great start to the weekend 🎉

This evening we had a post bank holiday posting task! A new volunteer-led repair cafe is being set up in Beckenham and the team wanted a hand spreading the word, to recruit volunteers, to let people know they can get their stuff fixed for free, and to ultimately lead to less waste and less buying new. Lovely stuff.

We met at Beckenham Spa and welcomed Jane and Karine who are brand new to GoodGym - so great that you chose to join us today!

We split into two groups - Stephen, Charlie, Karine and Jane took on a nearby road, whilst Ria, Michael and I did a short jog round the corner.

150 or so leaflets down, we called it a day with a few of us taking extra leaflets to pop into shops/other streets.

Nice one, team!

I'm pretty sure it's the hottest day of the year or something, so some of us were definitely FLAGGING today.

We kicked off at the Bridge House with our top ways to cool down. Fans, iced coffee, cold showers - nice.

Then we split into a couple of groups with the blokes taking a stroll and the women doing a run to Cator Park.

Their new Tiny Forest was looking a wee bit weedy so our task was to get some fresh mulch from the piles over the other side of the park. Buckets, wheelbarrows and many shovels were used to get a good third of the new saplings surrounded.

Millie wasn't sure they were going to get the exciting new Green Flag raised without her husband, so most of us headed off, but fortunately Hannah filmed the flag raising.

Well done Friends of Cator Park and Alexandra Recreation Ground. And well done GoodGymers for playing a seriously key role in making this happen.