👋 20 GoodGymmers met on a sunny evening for our group run. We were thrilled to welcome a few new faces. Beattie was visiting from London while Paddy has recently moved up after doing a few sessions with GG Bristol. Ivana and Rachel both came along for their first GG sessions tonight. It was brilliant to meet you all and we hope we’ll see you again soon.

🍝 We named, numbered and warmed up while discussing our favourite nostalgic food from childhood. Macaroni cheese was a surprise hit, along with various snacks and the like. We were soon ready to run off for our task.

🍎 We were headed to Leeman’s Park Community Orchard where we were helping Abundance York with various jobs. Mitch and Rich immediately nabbed the litter pickers to form “Team Apple”, also nominating themselves as bad and good apple respectively. Their job was to pick up any windfall apples and assign them into the good or bad apple boxes. Sadly, there were significantly more bad apples than good apples, but that was apparently to be expected and even the bad apples were making their way to the wildlife area so will hopefully help some wildlife.

🍓 Meanwhile, “Team dead raspberry” were cutting back dead raspberry canes to help them regrow and produce more raspberries next summer. Others were tackling the big bramble and thistle patches, with scythes, loppers and forks. Louise was delighted with the progress there, and Paddy seemed equally delighted to get to use a scythe for the first time 💪

🏃‍♀️🏃Lots of progress was made and it was soon time for a group photo before the party pacers started their slightly more leisurely jog back to base. The rest of us did a quick relay-based fitness session (accompanied by a very enthusiastic small dog) before heading to the river towards base.

🦺 Unfortunately, our arrival back to base was delayed after a few eagle-eyed GoodGymmers spotted someone in the river. Some incredibly quick thinking and acting meant we were able to reach her with a life ring and pull her out while Abigail called for an ambulance. Our resident paramedic Lyndsay arrived on scene first and was able to liaise with the ambulance crew when they arrived. Thank you everyone for your heroic efforts that may well have saved someone’s life.

🍻 Once back at base, some of us decided that a pub trip was definitely needed, to end a very unusual evening.

Three of us met Ruth from Abundance York to help get the remaining apples 🍏 🍎 from the trees before Friday when they would no longer be able to access the site⛔️. After Sunday's group had done such a good job, the only apples left were quite high and difficult to reach. The fact that the trees were on a steep slope, and we'd had some rain 🌧, added to the difficulty. Armed with a variety of tools, along with a couple of other volunteers, after an hour we had managed to fill a few crates of apples 🍏 (including some nice big ones) which Ruth later informed me totalled about 45kg.

These Granny Smiths type apples keep well (so Ruth told me) so they will be stored 📦 for a few weeks and given to various food projects in York. A great task to save such wonderful fruit from going to waste. We managed to dodge the rain during the task but sadly not on our way home as we were treated to another shower 🌧.

It's apples! A big tree with fruit. It has the juice. It has the juice. I can't imagine a more beautiful thing.

Today, a crack team of GoodGym York ran and cycled to help out Abundance York. Abundance York pick fruit from private gardens and council land around York. The apples picked are distributed to foodbanks, homeless cooking projects, and community centres, and Abundance prioritise deprived areas of York.

On this occasion, they have access the apple trees on the site of an old care home. The twist? The care home is being sold on Friday, so there's a limited time for Abundance to save as many fruit as possible before the property changes hands.

8 of us showed up, and enjoyed using various grabbers to fill up as many crates with apples as we could. There were even some awe inspiring displays of tree climbing to reach some of the sneakier apples hiding in the canopy. Within an hour we'd filled several boxes and headed off - we'll see if we can help at all at this site again before the week ends, but in any case we can always do a core workout to help Abundance.

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Here's an update we got from Ruth at Abundance later in the day: The team picked 10 crates of apples in the end. Awesome work! 192kg of "good" apples as well as 30kg or so of windfalls (Good bramleys at Waitrose prices are 2.25/kg so that would be £432 of apples) All going out to good causes around York, including a first delivery to "Choose To Youth" tonight. (https://www.choose2youth.co.uk/ ) this evening, and a couple of bags to Acomb foodbank tomorrow morning.

Six Goodgymers joined Abundance York for another apple-picking session, venturing perilously high into the trees in search of the ones that had escaped us last time. A wholesome (if slightly risky) task for a blustery Saturday morning! While Tom, Cara and Jenna honed their skills with the apple-pickers (and avoided the apples raining down from the sky), Ellie, Michal and Lucy clambered up into the trees in search of the biggest and best fruit (always just out of reach!). The result was plenty of apples to go to local community projects, and a few more that came home with us for bonus snacks/crumble.

Back in the dim and distant past of the "Before Times" (before Covid) apparently one of the first GoodGym York community missions was to put down woodchip between the trees in the orchard at Alex Lyons House in Tang Hall to make it easier for the elderley residents to get out into the orchard. Turns out of you leave woodchip for long enough it turns into soil and the weeds love it, so they all needed hoicking out. And so the circle of GG life begins again: will we be getting called back to put down some new woodchip? Watch this space!

As always, we cracked through a huge amount of unskilled labour in an hour, and in the dark at least it looked great. The soil was stuffed full with super long roots from the weeds that needed dragging free (long enough to skip with, sadly no pictures * UPDATE: Tom has sent a picture of Leanne root skipping :-) *. By the end all four compost bins were full and a huge bonus pile created.

What did we learn tonight? We learnt that Amy Tew has done 50 good deeds, and does a cool, pointy superhero impression. We learnt that Mitch likes things "green and firm" (apples, I hope) and is not as strong as Nikki. And I learnt that my gloves have a massive hole letting the nettles in.

I met Louise from Abundance York at an address just a few minutes walk from home. The homeowner had two large apple trees and didn’t want the fruit to go to waste. I started off with the very long ‘claw type’ picker in the eating apple tree (some sort of gala variety Louise thought) while Louise and the homeowner set to work on the bramley apple tree. As some of the bramleys were quite big they made a great thud when they hit the ground, much to the delight of the homeowner’s little boy who was enjoying watching us. Louise gathered up any that had fallen (and were possibly bruised) separately while I carefully placed the ones I’d picked into the trays. After 45 minutes I had to leave to go to my second GG mission of the day but was pleased to be able to help.