I cycled to visit Ms J who is truly adorable woman well supported by additional services. It was truly challenged for me today as I was on my own. However , I think that I managed to transfer overgrown garden into safe, nice and clean place when you can spot the garden ornaments adding these place a character. See the photos before and after transformation. Mrs J was super happy 😊 too.

4 Goodgymmers turned up on this sunny Sunday morning at Springfield Park to paint the shelter which needed a new lick of black paint. Welcome new Goodgymmers Charlotte, Marek and Ollie!

We used wired brushes on the pillars to get rid of cobwebs and used white spirit to clean the surfaces. We then focused on the areas of graffiti to paint over, whilst listening to some tunes provided Marek.

This task made a big difference! We will be back to complete the paint job and move some logs to the new forest teaching area.

This week, the trolley was back in action with it's full compliment of wheels. This went some way to making up for the depleted number of volunteers.

With the task now down to a fine art, task owner and goodgymmer made good progress, helped briefly and periodically by a couple of other local tree volunteers unable to stay for the full hour but wanting to help out as much as they could.

Within an hour (and after another hot day), all baby trees had been given a drink for another week.

12 GoodGymers ran 1k and shovelled 32 tonnes of mulch to reach our pathway goal!

Thank you to everyone who could make and wanted to make my last session as Group leader.

Starting the session with a running loop around the perimeter of London Fields to get us rolling for the session ahead!

Delighted that after about 10 sessions of graft on the pathway we reached out target and the conservation area now has a great mulch pathway which will allow year round accessibility to the educational and park users as they get to use the pathway to experience the bio-diverse area.

Some fresh mulch was very useful and having Peter fixing 3 barrows, and having an extra barrow really boosted productivity!! An amazing cheer squad from some well hydrated locals helled our push along the pathway together with some quality workout tunes to keep us in rhythm as we shoveled.

Great team work, stories, graft and laughs made for a very productive hour of GG action!!

With the pathway complete we headed off to hang out as a GG group one last time! Awesome to remember the best and worst tasks we had done together over the last nearly decade of GoodGym action.

Its been a blast to hang out with such a fun group both tonight and everyone of the weeks over the last 9 years!

Always Love

Joel

It was time to water the thirsty trees of Stoke Newington Common again, and two goodgymmers were on hand to help the regular volunteers of Stoke Newington Common Users Group (SNUG) do the job.

No sooner had we filled the bottles of water and arrived at the first watering point, but the wheel fell off the wagon.

Undeterred, the continued the task by hand, carrying two bottles each to the baby trees. Despite our efforts last week and the lower temperatures recently, the water was much needed so we will be back lending a hand again very soon.

As Ms V correctly identified as she showed me into her sparkling clean bathroom, there is nothing more awkward than a loose toilet seat. Her request was to remove the existing (broken) one and replace with a new version that she'd bought.

Now never in my wildest dreams did I ever imagine I'd spend a Monday afternoon with my hand in a complete stranger's toilet bowl (the perils of dropping a slippery Allen key at just the wrong moment...), but that unexpected pleasure aside, I was quickly able to remove the old broken fittings and instal Ms V's shiny white new seat.

Ms V didn't perform a full test drive of her new throne in front of me (...), but after giving it a good wiggle, she declared herself much happier, and I wished her many comfortable hours ahead.