This Sunday afternoon, I met up with Sam for a mission in Hackney.

Our mission beneficiary, Mrs J, wanted to tidy her garden up now that spring is here. Unfortunately, her mobility means that she finds this difficult to do by herself, and so asked if we could come along to help out.

Mrs J's garden is a decent size, and so Sam and I decided to concentrate on cleaning up some of the front part of it to make more of an impact. This largely meant weeding, pruning, hacking and sweeping, while occasionally stopping to play with some friendly neighborhood cats (Mrs J feeds them treats, so you can tell that she's a good person). Luckily, Mrs J had an impressive array of tools for us to use, so none of these operations were particularly difficult (I've made a note of the brand that manufactured her secateurs, because they were seriously beautiful! 😍).

As Sam and I worked, we generally chatted about GoodGym, running and dysfunctional families (which seems appropriate for Mother's Day 😅). The time seemed to fly by, and it wasn't too long before we were packing up to leave, the cats having approved of our work (you could even say that we weeded our way to happy cats, rather than to happiness, but I honestly think that they're the same thing).

Mrs J also seemed happy with the work we'd done as we made our goodbyes (although we weren't able to finish clearing some grass or pruning another shrub close to the front fence, so it was still looking a bit rough and ready in places!) Hopefully we can arrange a repeat mission to finish this off, and to prune some more shrubs to the rear of the garden.

Great working with you, Sam! I'll probably catch you on another one of these again soon! 😄

Mr E needed his bed and belongings moved from the top floor of his house to the living room, due to a narrow stairwell we couldn't get the sofa up stairs though! His family really appreciated the helping hand

Grey and damp but at least the rain held off. Two runners cleared ivy which was smothering a window, nettles and other assorted weeds from this back garden, and uncovered a massive earthworm (boot in photo for scale). Two huge sacks of garden waste later, we left a very satisfied Mr A who can now see out of his window again.