Today's Penn Road Gardens session involved a lot of leaves. A whole 90 minutes of raking for the team. First up was clearing leaves from under the benches to uncover any hidden litter. Bottles, vapes and food packaging was pulled out for the litter picking team to bag, while bags full of yellow and brown leaves made their way to the compost heaps.

Some unexpected finds glittered at the GoodGymers from the leaves. There was a silver teaspoon and a golden bracelet with diamonds that had been lost under a bench. Well, actually, the spoon was from Ikea and the bracelet still needs to be professionally valued, but it was shiny 🤩! Either way, they were stashed in the Penn Road treasure chest, along with all their other plundered valuables.

Once the bench areas were clean, the big win was to clear the lawns of leaves. The GoodGymers speed raked with one of the regular volunteers and managed to clear the largest grassy area before a tea break was called and it was time to leave for their next task.

The next community session at Penn Road Gardens will be on the 30th of November, when they'll be planting bulbs to flower in the spring. There will also be a thank you to all of this year's volunteers as they'll give out a Xmas decoration and a hyacinth bulb to each of the attendees, in case you needed any more incentive to help this wonderful, community maintained garden.

Two GoodGymers helped the Penn Road Gardens community with some early spring de-wedding and edge trimming

John: On arrival, I was asked whether I knew anything about gardening. “I just do what I’m told”, I answered, based on my GoodGym experiences. Still. I was trusted to remove anything dead from a large area, which resembled a low-growing forest. But how do I know what’s dead, I wondered. This turned out to be simple – anything dry and crinkly, falling on its side or just looking limp. I soon discovered there were a lot of deceased plants, or more often parts of plants, in the undergrowth and the overgrowth. Two hours flew by, and there was more I could have done, but I had other plans, and anyway we’ll undoubtedly be back next month.

Emily: I spent an hour and filled about 5 bags of dead vegetation for the compost. As always the Penn Road volunteers were lovely and came round multiple times offering tea and biscuits!

Lots of trimming all around the gardens :)

Sevan was back at Penn Road Gardens for the first time in ages. Arriving a bit early, he did a quick litter pick until others arrived. While tidying up, he found some cultured snails gathered round a biography of Stalin!

The residents told of the exciting/concerning event that had taken place since last month's volunteering session. A scooter had been dumped and set on fire next to the equipment shed. The residents had reacted quickly to damp down the flames and London Fire Brigade had arrived in a speedy 6 minutes. Still, there were plenty of signs of singeing on the nearby bushes.

Sevan spent the whole session in the area of the fire, trimming back anything burned or that'd withered in the heat. The advice to him was, if you're not sure, cut it back anyway

"It [the rose bush] looks unsightly. Cut it right back. If it survives, it survives. If not, it's a new planting opportunity" - Local resident

A few charred scooter parts were found too and binned while everything organic was fed to the wood chipper to have a second life as compost.

5 GoodGymers joined the residents of Penn Road Gardens to help out with a variety of tasks. Composting, saving snails and ridding the garden of invasive plants.