Saturdays have got HUGE! Over 30 people on today's group run to Bramble farm including half of Goodgym Bath :-) Great to see you Bath peeps today - we love our nearest GG neighbours!

With such a big group it was a good thing that Dave stepped up to help lead one half - and it was fun on the way over trying to guess which route he was taking and see who got there first. Kudos to my half for sterling efforts on Victoria park hill!

Once there, Chris and Kim were ready with lots of brill tasks. The farm is run entirely by a small group of families so we were able to supply lots of manual labour, digging out some strawberry beds, digging in cardboard to create some potato beds and lots of weeding and compost spreading.

There was a bit of a debate over the best way to plant a potato but everyone was in agreement that they should be positioned 'eyes up'.

Some also felt that the clay based soil was a little hard to turn - but hey, what great strength work! And great to see Kim and Adeline demonstrate proper double-digging :-)

All that photographing of cats, ducks, goats and the odd Goodgym'er was hungry work and I expect the digging was a bit too so it was great to see cake and biscuits appear to fuel us on our way home - and it's always nice to see Matt happy.

Great work everyone!

(Apologies for the 'misty' effect on the right hand side of the pictures - my camera lens needed a bit of a clean)

I want a goat.

I want a white nanny goat called Lily that amiably wanders round, curious to see how each Goodgymer is doing on their section of a new water channel and then waits contentedly to be petted before moving on to the next person.

Sadly this seems to be destined to be a pipe dream as it might be a little impractical keeping a full grown nanny goat in a third floor flat.

I'd also make a terrible goat keeper as once again we failed to open the gates before shooing in the kids in our warm up today. I'll put it down to the distraction of the rather cold conditions, although we did at least manage to get to and from the task without any major snowfall today.

The run to the urban dairy farm allotment "Street Goat" is a challenging one, a good 5k of gradual climb where the hill isn't always perceptible visually but rather is progressively felt the closer you get to the destination. Everyone did really well though and we benefited from a quick rest half way through while Julie changed out of her parkrun pyjamas (or onesie).

We were met at the allotment by Amy who was fully prepared with an array of spades and mattocks - yes that's right, mattockS plural - not often you get that on a Bristol Goodgym task. These were to be used to dig a water channel from a water trough to the barn where the goats hang out. This was quite a distance but with 17 people spread out along the length it was fully completed by the end of our stay and there was still plenty of time to check out the goats and enjoy the delicious flapjack and refreshments that Amy had supplied for us. The hot drinks were especially welcome after an hour spent in freezing winds at the top of a hill - once again well done to all involved!

But wait, 17 Goodgymers? What about the other 4? Well one was as usual shirking the work and wandering around taking photographs (and making friends with goats). But the other three were working hard to reposition a line of fence posts - quite a challenge when you can't feel your fingers even through two pairs of gloves. Nice one Alex, Paddy and Tom!

Thanks to Dave for backmarking today.

Pretty much the perfect task today, lots of hands making light work of an allotment clearance to make way for a community chicken farm and orchard.

But we had to get there first! Our destination was in St George and that meant a longish run with a gradual climb so it wasn't altogether a surprise that we arrived a little later than planned to find our hosts Harriet and Phil already hard at work. Trees had been cut down and rubbish piled neatly in the centre all ready for us.

With only the briefest wistful glance at the two handed saw on the way past, everyone first got to work sorting the sawn branches into larger (thigh-sized) firewood and smaller assortments.

This done, we tackled our main job, moving all the rubbish up the hill to a waiting skip. For this, we divided into two groups with the lower team passing items over a fence so the higher team could deposit them in the skip.

All sorts of items went by - old broken up wheelbarrows (sad), carpet, smelly buckets of smelly stuff and window frames and shed panels. With so many people this was all achieved pretty quickly and by the time we left, the rubbish pile was no more.

It only remained to enjoy some welcome pastries and even a little amber hued refreshment which was very well earned (and much appreciated) by all involved!