GoodGym Lambeth Run Report 🏃‍♀️🌱

Agnes Riley Gardens - Pond Weed Warriors!

This week, our magnificent GoodGymers wheely outdid themselves at Agnes Riley Gardens! 💚

We joined forces with Harriet and the Friends of the Gardens for some serious pond-to-compost action. The mission? Transport mountains of freshly dredged pond weeds to their final resting place. It was time to get mucky! 🌿

The Dream Team 👏

A huge welcome to our fabulous first-timers Omkar and Bill - you absolutely smashed it! We hope this is just the beginning of your GoodGym journey. You’ve set the bar-row very high! 🎉

Our legendary regulars were back and better than ever: Ben, Perdie, Fi, Adam, and the amazing Tilly, who blessed us all with her heavenly brownies and meringue cookies (because nothing says “well done” like sugar and carbs after manual labour!). 🍪🤎

The Task 💪

Armed with garden forks, spades, and brooms, we got straight to work loading up our trusty wheelbarrows - affectionately dubbed Barrow Obama, Wheeliam Shakespeare, and Scarlett Jobarrowson - and sprinted them over to the compost heap. It was basically CrossFit meets gardening, and we were here for it!

Special Guest Appearance 🦎

Mid-mission, we discovered an adorable pond newt (now officially named Isaac Newt-on) chilling in the weeds. After a brief photoshoot, Sir Newt-on was safely returned to his watery kingdom. Long may he reign! 👑

The Verdict ✨

Another fantastic evening of fitness, friendship, and freshly cleared ponds! The gardens are looking gorgeous, our legs got a serious workout, and we all left with muddy trainers and massive smiles.

Until next week, GoodGymers! Keep running, keep doing good! 🏃‍♂️💚

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Interested in joining us? Check out GoodGym Lambeth for upcoming tasks!

A beautiful summers evening (finally) for this weeks Group Run to Agnes Riley Gardens. Our task this week was to clean up a pond of weed and litter and make a staircase for baby frogs to get out of the ponds. We headed off just after 7 for a uphill slog to the south circular 🥵

Upon arriving we were greeted and promptly split into two groups - heavy work or delicate work. Heavy work entailed digging out two submerged pots from the pond, removing pots when they were light enough, taking soil to the compost area, collecting stones and finally building a stone staircase for the frogs to leave the pond. Joao, Inny, Katy, Lindy, Nathan and Shauna took this job.

Delicate work involved fishing, raking, scooping weeds out of the big pond, searching through them for tadpoles and throwing the tadpoles back in the water.

Once we were done we headed back to Brixton, this time a little bit cooler and a nice bit of downhill!

Three seasoned GoodGymmers cleared some planters of soil on a beautifully warm and sunny Tuesday evening. As soon as we arrived we got stuck straight in. The Friends of Agnes Riley Gardens needed us to help remove soil from planters from the polytunnel area to some big bags so that the planters can be moved. There were about 4 or 5 planters of soil to be moved but since they were having more volunteers in the coming days, they just needed us to make a good start. All three of us cleared the first planter within about 20-25 minutes so we were feeling pretty confident and pledged to do three by the time we left.

We then realised we'd been a bit ambitious when we started to get a bit tired in the arms, backs and legs. We also ran into some difficulty clearing planter #2 as it had lots of polystyrene blocks in it to help with drainage. This made it much more tricky to shovel soil from. We ended up filling about three large buckets worth of polystyrene from the second planter.

We stopped after we'd been there just over an hour and had succeeded in our goal of tackling three planters! 💪

The folk at Agnes Riley Gardens had made two planters and set them up in one corner of their lovely community garden only to discover that it was too shady to let anything grow. So they asked GoodGym Lambeth for some help and help we did

Arriving at dusk, we quickly emptied the soil out of one of the planters into buckets and barrows, and then gracefully(ish) carried the empty planters all the way across to their new sunny spots. And then filled them all up again.

It was all over so quickly, Adrian couldn't really believe it but that's the power of GoodGym.

8 of us met up at Agnes Riley Gardens on a frosty Sunday morning to lend a hand in maintaining the community-run allotment.

We were tasked with de-weeding and flattening the vegetable plots, ready for planting. There were a few fennels left still surviving the winter chill, so we made sure to re-plant those somewhere else instead of uprooting and mixing with the weeds.

Within an hour, we had cleared almost all of the weeds from the plot and raked it over smoothly - a dramatic difference from when we started!

Well done everyone :)

35 excellent runners gathered at Papa's Park for our group run tonight.

We said a huge Lambeth welcome to 6 brilliant new runners - Anna, Jessie, Emma, Isla, Kate and Harriet

Next, we heard about these exciting events coming up in Lambeth and our neighbouring areas:

• A community mission at Herne Hill Halloween party at 7pm on Thursday 31st October.
• A parkrun takeover at Burgess Park with GG Southwark at 8:30am on Saturday 2nd November.
• The monthly kebab chase meeting at 10am on Sunday 3rd November at BaBa Boom Battersea.
• A big GoodGym London social from 6:30pm on Friday 9th November.

Lots of lovely things to get involved with :)

It was also SPOTM week and this week's very well-deserved winner of a unique assortment of National Trust pens, Puregym freebies, a bookmark and possibly the world's smallest notebook was Shauna. Despite only joining GoodGym recently, Shauna is already on her 15th good deed and her 9th for October. Huge kudos and thank you!

And onto the main event aka tonight's task.

We split into two groups to run there, David and Charlotte leading a slightly longer run whilst George and Nicky led a more relaxed party pace troop.

On arrival, we surprised Karen with the size of our group but quickly split into teams, digging up stones around the veg plot, moving planks of wood and clearing the area around the Bug Hotel. After half an hour, Karen seemed very happy with what we'd done and we headed back to base to enjoy some delicious cake expertly baked by Becca and Angela

Great work everyone, thank you so much and hopefully see you at next week's group run for more getting fit and doing good.