This evening we returned to the Warneford Hospital site, this time to help with their orchard - and to spruce up a few shrubs too - a double task!

Once we had weeded around a few shrubs in the main body of the site we ventured over to the orchard - some of us feeling rather relived to have chosen wellies as footwear! We were tasked with de-mulching some young trees to avoid rot, and gathering and picking lots of apples to be sent off to make delicious fresh apple juice.

We soon discovered that the vast majority of apples were REALLY high up! Apple picking baskets and Shati and Georgia's climbing skills to the rescue!!

It was a bit of a race against time with the evening drawing in but we managed to gather a considerable amount of apples, and maybe even nibble a few!

Welcome to Goodgym Georgia - thank you gor bringing your tree climbing skills!!

Over the last 2 years the Warneford Hospital has been building an eight-bed psychiatric intensive care unit (PICU) to enable young people experiencing the most acute phase of a serious mental disorder to receive specialist help closer to home. The new Meadow Unit opened late last year, adjoining the Highfield Unit where we've been involved previously.

The gardens at the Meadow Unit have been designed and planted but over the summer months have become swamped with weeds. De-weeding is the perfect job for a GoodGym flash mob - many hands make light work! Starting in the furthest section of gardens we gradually worked our way back to the external gates, freeing geraniums, hydrangeas and pretty grasses from encroaching weeds. Lots of careful checking of "weed or deliberate?!" ensued as we did our level best not to pull up anything that should be there (including the intentional thistles). We cleared numerous trugs and wheelbarrows full of weeds, tried our best to keep our chat quiet by the ward windows (not easy with many back for their first task post summer holidays and lots to catch up on!), and learnt plenty about about plant identification.

We very much hope the garden thrives as it gets more established and is a joyful feature for service users and staff.

Welcome to GoodGym Charlie!

Last night we made a return to the garden of the Highfield Unit after a 2 year hiatus. The Highfield is the young people's mental health in-patient unit at Warneford Hospital. Some of the garden has recently been redesigned into a much more inviting space, which was lovely to see.

The garden is divided into 3 sections, so we divided into a trio of teams to weed, prune and lop. We weeded and pruned outside the dining room to give a clearer view of the lovely new garden design, lopped bramble and pulled up nettles in the mosaic garden, and weeded and pruned the shaded corridor space outside some of the bedrooms.

We amassed a large pile of clippings and prunings and worked up a bit of a sweat, so were grateful for the water and biscuits we were given at the end.

Welcome to GoodGym Catriona (Kitty).

Tiny Forest brings the benefits of woodland right into the heart of our cities and urban spaces: connecting people with nature, helping to mitigate the impacts of climate change, as well as providing nature-rich habitat to support urban wildlife.

Earthwatch is pioneering Tiny Forest in the UK and is conducting a UK-wide research study to help us understand how these super tiny woods have the potential to be super powerful.

Last night Earthwatch Europe launched their Lottery funded partnership with GoodGym at the Littlemore Tiny Forest.

A couple of years ago 600 saplings were planted in a patch of ground 200 metres square (roughly the size of a tennis court), and the plot is now a lovely baby woodland at the end of a wild flower patch.

Earthwatch are collecting data on biodiversity, carbon storage, flood mitigation and thermal comfort in the Tiny Forest in order to see how the scheme could help in urban areas. 100 of the 600 trees in the Littlemore Tiny Forest have been tagged to be regularly monitored, and these were the main focus of our citizen science.

Dividing into trios we made our way around the site checking that the trees were correctly identified in the database, measuring height and girth, and counting the number of stems for multi-stem trees. It turned out to be a very satisfying task - particularly tracking down the last few elusive tagged trees! We managed to find and monitor 58 trees in under an hour.

Other experiments made observations on water soak away and thermal comfort. Tracking the changes over the next few years will be very interesting.

Welcome to GoodGym Mark and Jac. Great to have a visitor from the central team Theresa.

Last night we were asked to return to Cotswold House Eating Disorder Unit to work on the garden. The unit has a pretty courtyard garden filled with aromatic herbs, lavendar and buddleia. It's nicely thought out, with treats for the eyes and the nose, as well as being full of plants which pollinators love. Last year we did a couple of gardening sessions to keep the weeds at bay and as the weather starts to warm up it was high time we returned to give the garden a once-over before the weeds take hold. The pots and planters had been planted up with pansies since out last visit - lovely and cheery - and a general prune of the larger shrubs had obviously been done recently. That meant we didn't need to tackle too much bamboo and could focus on weeding between the paving, digging out long grass encroaching on the borders, and some light pruning and trimming of last year's dead growth to allow the newly emerging shoots to get light and space.

An hour flew by - it's easy to lose track of time when you're busy!

Cotswold House is an award winning specialist adult eating disorders service provided by Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust. There are 2 two modern eating disorders units in Oxford and Marlborough, Wiltshire. After our day trip to Marlborough to tidy up the garden of the Cotswold House there we were recommende to Oxford site too. Et voila! Cotswold House take 2!

After some minor faffing trying to get the garden gates open, we soon got to work in the walled garden. The Warneford Hospital site is large but only has a very small gardening team, so it's difficult for them to lavish lots of attention on weeding and pruning. The Cotswold House garden used to be looked after by a keen volunteer gardener, but recently it has got a bit overgrown, so secateurs and pruning saws in hand we started to tackle the job.

This turned into one of the most fragrant garden tasks we've ever had, as we lopped back sage (who knew sage grows into a whole woody shrub if you let it?!), rosemary, lavender, and buddleia. Jessy and Sarah did great work clearing a bench from under a tangle of bamboo and roses - looked beautiful in a wild kinda way, but not great for accessing the seat! Others pruned, weeded, and sawed, amassing a large pile of trimmings and weeds. Wheelbarrow crew trekked across the site to dispose of most of it on the big compost heap near the meadow, but there was a small amount left in the garden to be collected another time.

There was even time for a bit of ping pong before we left the garden.

Good work team!

Thanks to our Run Leaders for their help - Ben for leading the run up to Warneford Hospital, and Bethan for coordinating a longer run after the task.

Welcome to GoodGym Joe - lovely to meet you!