Four GoodGymers walked, cycled and ran to help Cultivate London beautify the green areas around Ealing Hospital this morning. They were all warmed up and raring to go, then they were led into the depths of the hospital, to the Estates office, where they went through a contractor health and safety briefing on the office computers. It covered working at heights, what to do if they found asbestos and how to get permission for digging work. Well, maybe the digging part would be relevant 🤷.

Once out of the basement and back in the sun, the task for the day was to rake and flatten some new flower beds, then scatter wildflower seeds to make this stretch of Uxbridge Road more colourful and increase biodiversity. There was big group of volunteers to help out on the various tasks, which was great.

Rebekah, Chris and Richard got going on one of the beds that needed flattening, moving sand and soil from the far side of the car park, then raking it to be smooth and picking out any big rocks. Sevan had decided to use his brain instead (for once) and was doing some mental maths to calculate the area of each part of a prepared flower bed, then working out the weight of seed and sand mix to be sprinkled on each.

Having done the hard maths, Sevan joined the other 3 as they worked their way along two more beds, making them look their best before the seed planting. The chat turned to work and job hunts, so Sevan semi-jokingly asked Romina if Cultivate had any jobs going where the GoodGymers could do more good stuff. Romina gave each of them had a grilling about any relevant skills they had, other than wheelbarrowing and raking, with a couple of possible collaborations to come.

Chris and Sevan headed off at midday, with Rebekah and Richard staying on into the afternoon to do some seed scattering and moving more soil.

If you want to get involved in improving the hospital grounds for patients, passers by and insects, sign up for next week's session here.

Thursday evening and 3 Ealing cavaleiros who normally have a mission free evening were seen galopping around Acton station. They were going to treat themselves with some much needed man(u)cure at Romina's Beauty Salo(o)n as their hands needed some attention after many sessions. When they arrived at the stables(school), Romina gave them a job that did not promise a stable income. They were presented with a pile of horse buns and road apples to be moved into massive bags with the use of shit showvels. Aroma around the school yard was noticed and the dunkers were thinking of getting some Secretions Magnifique eau de toilette after their session. During the task, the 2 cavaleiros and the Queen of Dung noticed the fumes coming out of the pile : freshly made horse buns? Romina also noticed that the pile was hot and steamy!!!Seems that some of the horses went on a night out : some having a curry ,kebab or a more veggie option one(hay)!. After completing their doody duty, the 3 globetrotters checked their hooves and raced across the borough to a much needed shower. Steph arrived home and his cat Guinness was not impressed by his hooves and wanted to ask him a equestrian : Neigh was his reply!!

It took us a weekend task and a group run to rip the paving slabs off the surface of Jerome Allotments, a place sentenced to become yet another bunch of tower blocks in Acton. GoodGymers are the virtuosos of destruction, aren't they? What about construction? We had proven to Romina from Cultivate London that we can build stuff too, so she trusted that we can lay the slabs we had salvaged in a different location. How did it go?

Today's team had a nice balance of runners and cyclists. Annabel and guests from our neighbouring GoodGyms, Divya and Michelle, came to the task on their bikes, while runners Christos, Kash and Sevan enjoyed looping on a path around Ealing Common before making it to Popesfield Allotments.

The evening was bright, and Romina was enthusiastic about seeing the GoodGym engineering in action. The objective was to lay one row of paving slabs under the gate to Cultivate's plant nursery at the allotment. Sounds easy?

Here's the GoodGym Ealing slab-laying technique:

1. Measure the width of the gate
   
2. Measure the slabs (60x60 cm and 60x90 cm options)
   
3. Start digging the ground under the gate
   
4. Conclude that 6 people digging is too many
   
5. Let two team members fill bags with gravel for later
   
6. Keep digging
   
7. Measure the hole for the slabs
   
8. Make the hole wider
   
9. Throw some gravel into the hole
   
10. Level it
    
11. Throw some sand into the hole
    
12. Level it
    
13. Try out a slab and conclude it's not level
    
14. (ok, this one is important: if you are going to do it right, don't miss this - even if you feel you messed up the previous steps, just do this one) Get Michelle to do the Irish stepdance on the sand
15. Try out the slab again and marvel at the precision
    
16. Repeat steps 9-16 for other slabs

In a perfect world, the process would end there. But we don't live there. We live in a fun world! And there is always more fun to break the routine.

1. Switch on the floodlight
   
2. Let Romina notice that the slabs had been laid the other way around
   
3. Flip the slabs

In those 20 easy steps, we laid a row of slabs - and the most of them were even even! Romina appreciated our work ethic and drive to get the job done.

Thanks a lot for your help guys, you work always very hard and do always your best, we are lucky to have you working with us 🤗 - Romina

Next week we will be turning into interior (or shall I say - exterior?) designers to furnish the Transition Garden in Lammas Enclosure. Come and join us!

In a corner of a dark street, next to The Secret Slaboratory in South Acton, three GoodGymers stretching after a run were blinded by a bike light zigzagging with bravado towards them. It was no one else than Divya returning to GoodGym after his hibernation in the winter months!

Divya is the muscle and brains Ealing borrows from Hammersmith, and we were lucky to have him today at Jerome Allotments. The site has been already made partially inaccessible due to the commencing of building work. Romina from Cultivate London was hoping to salvage the paving slabs and reuse them at Popesfield Allotments. Some materials had been removed by GoodGym Hounslow and Ealing before, and some had been nicked before Cultivate managed to lift and transport them to the new home.

Tonight, we started where the slab-snatchers stopped. The six slabs were quite easily accessible, and we lifted and wheelbarrowed them outside the fencing, using a makeshift ramp to deal with a bump on the way. The next batch of slabs was not as simple to get to. They were surrounded by cobblestones we couldn't lever with spades.

"A sledgehammer could help here..." dreamt Sevan.

In the meantime, Romina had an alternative task: collecting the sand from under the slabs into bags. We switched to good, old-school shovelling, but some of us still had bigger ambitions.

"If we only had a sledgehammer..." - Sevan.

After some negotiation from Kash, Romina brought the favourite from Cultivate's tool shed:

The Mighty Sledgehammer.

While Steph and Kash worked on delivering the sand to the gate, Divya and Sevan formed a Research & Development Department to figure out how to get the cobblestones out of the way, generally, by smashing them. The innovative work brought fruits, and soon the trapped slabs were free to take. Once the GoodGymers figured out the right technique, there was no stopping them - apart from the timebox for the task!

Auberon from Cultivate joined the GoodGymers and Romina and used his formidable strength to transport the slabs through the gate faster. In an hour, the team rescued 20+ slabs and collected 7 bags of sand. That's a pretty impressive result for such a small group!

The slabs' story is not over! And you can become a part of it, even if you cannot lift. The idea of recycling the slabs is to reuse them at Popesfield Allotments, the new Cultivate site. To complete the end-to-end journey of the slabs, we will run in April to Popesfield to lay them down. Sign up now!

Next Tuesday, we are running to a location near Elthorne Park to mulch the fruit trees at community orchards maintained by HANGOT. Some of those GoodGymers helped plant this February. Sign up here for the next week's session!

When schools close for half term, there’s nothing better than escaping with the whole family for a well-deserved holiday! Or is there?

For Cultivate London and GoodGymers half term has different attractions in store: speed painting walls schools while kids are away! Romina from Cultivate has been tasked to gather volunteers who would paint the hall in Berrymede School in Acton. One of the groups she had booked for mid-week has cancelled the arrangement, and another party laid the first coat of paint. It was already Saturday afternoon and the children were going back to school on Monday!

Then eight GoodGymers from Ealing and Hounslow arrived!

Aprons and latex gloves on, white paint poured into trays, rollers and brushes ready. Get, set, go!

In about 75 minutes, the GoodGym team covered the entire bottom part of the wall that needed treatment with the second coat of paint! The last ten minutes they spent perfecting the art and concealing all the visible gaps.

A good quality check was possible thanks to Madhan who found the light switch. When Romina came back from the allotment to see the result, she found that GoodGymers lived up to their reputation.

Well done guys, very impressed but kinda expected it from you 😉

Because the whole hall was ours during the task, we put some music on. Michelle was the sound engineer and played a GoodGym-made, school-themed playlist, featuring classics like Pink Floyd.

Hey, teacher, leave them kids alone!

At the end of the session, Emmanuella, who hates waste, distributed plenty of organic brownies she had baked among the painters 💚

It was the last GoodGym session before the long holiday for both Michelle and Alan. A big thank you to both of them for making it to Ealing for that one!

Those who have visited Dean Gardens earlier in the week - at Tuesday volunteering session might have heard stories about bunkers buried beneath the green space. Three GoodGymers decided to grab spades today and verify whether the story was true!

That was not what exactly Auberon from Cultivate London wanted them to do... His plan was to dig horizontally rather than vertically. Sticking to the military theme, Auberon painted two lines in white spray and ordered his recruits to dig two parallel trenches along the railings next to Leeland Terrace.

That was the start of the community activity organised by Cultivate and the council: planting a new wildlife hedge in Dean Gardens. The number of volunteers, including groups of college students looking for volunteer experience, surprised Auberon. Luckily, he brought enough tools (in a van larger than CultiVan) to keep the production line going. While some people were still digging the trench, others were already planting the trees and covering the roots with soil (or mud!). Another group was already progressing with the second trench, and soon, a mulching unit was needed.

Auberon knew he had a perfect squad that didn't need to be told how to mulch. The GoodGymers grabbed shovels and a couple of wheelbarrows and started woodchipping the newly planted trees. They were already warmed up for all aspects of tree planting that day, after the morning session with HANGOT at their orchards.

With plenty of volunteers, the planting operation was finished in 90 minutes and the length of the hedge in Dean Gardens tripled! The spare 30 minutes and the spare woodchip were used to mulch the existing young trees and the flowerbeds in colourful wooden boxes.

The next session with Cultivate London will be in Acton next Sunday - sign up now!