Beautiful spring sunshine welcomed us as we gathered at the Green Flag to launch another round of the monthly People's Park litter pick.

Splitting up and roving around the park we collected all the litter dropped by recent park users enjoying the warm weather.

The trees in the orchard also got a thorough watering with those on that task getting lots of steps in by having to walk watering cans out from the nearby houses and across to field to the trees and return for refills.

When our time was up we returned to the flag with our collected bags to count them up: 14 bags in total, not bad for a morning in the sun 🌞

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This week our Group Run took us up the hill to the sunny Ferndale Leisure Gardens, an allotment space that had been underused for some time and needs the old plots clearing out of all the old junk collected by past tenants to make inviting open spaces ready for new tenants.

In this visit we tackled a tough patch that we couldn't deal with last time. There was a pile of something buried under thick brambles. This time we brought some clippers to cut away the bramble and gain access. It was a pile of corrugated metal roof panels, old windows and wooden pallets among other random buckets and broken spades and old hose pipe.

With seven of us on the case we managed to extract all the junk and carry it up the hill to the entrance gate and sorted it into piles of wood, plastic and metal which will be collected for recycling.

We'll be back here again in a few weeks because theres plenty more plots that need clearing out!

It was a glorious sunny morning, and just the kind of weather to get a good group of us out in People's Park for the monthly litter pick. It was great to see Yasin and Derrick, who we haven't seen for a while. MArtin managed to get in a few extra steps on the walking machine in the play park.

Between us we managed to find all the ingredients from a recent romantic evening at the park, a few spent prophylactics, a half a bottle of whisky, assorted beer cans and wine bottles and even a pair of M&S finest lacy briefs with a delightful lipstick pattern on them!

At the end of the session Rachel treated us to an Easter Egg Hunt, although we were slightly disappointed that she hadn't got dressed up as the Easter Bunny!

It was a great pleasure to be part of this program today, indeed I made a good decision joining Goodgym!

Well I guess it would be nice.... to do another litterpick at Leagrave Park. This month along with helping the FoLP with their monthly litterpick, this task was also helping Kevin from ABCD-IN-LUTON complete another leg of his Great British Spring Clean challenge, where he is working with lots of different community groups to help get Luton Tidy and Keep Britian Tidy as part of a national initiative that he has spearheaded locally for the last few years. 6 Luton Goodgymers joined some local residents to see what they could find on the walk around the park today. A purse, an iPhone, a rather scary knife (which was dealt with appropriately) a sign for a car boot sale, the arm of a sofa and a drone amongst other delights all added to a haul of roughly 20 bags of rubbish. The team had fun too some taking on the woodland, others enjoying a nice stroll in the sunshine and a couple opting to get the waders on and head into the river Lea. But before that river becomes an ocean I need to give a shout out to our GG first timer Osama Faith. I hope you enjoyed the task and we look forward to seeing you out with the team again soon. Another great effort today team 👏 Well done everyone.

Four of the GoodGym Luton team headed out to the Ferndale Leisure Gardens, where things are getting ready for the new growing season and new tenants to come in and try their hand growing some veggies.

Many of the plots have been without tenants for a while and the accumulated junk of previous tenants needs clearing out to make nice clear plots for new tenants.

So we were pulling out the rotten old wood from past beds and structures, metal cold frames, plastics of all sorts to leave nothing but bare earth. All this junk was sorted and stacked for removal to the recycling centre but we didn't get through it all so we will return to have another go at it. It's amazing how much junk there is, even after our huge effort to clear these plots last year!