Tonight we celebrated Earth Day with a digging task. It was a continuation of what we started last week at St Mary's Farnham Royal Primary School in their learning garden.

Last week we dug up bed 2 and removed as many weeds as we could. This evening we carried on ensuring the bed was weed free and did a little bit more around the strawberry and garlic sections.

We met directly at the task and our task owner Chrissy made sure we were given all the access we needed.

Great to have Firmo and Jason join us on their first task tonight. And Anna on her second task. Hope you enjoyed it and will come back again soon.

It's your bEARTH DAY!

So what exactly is Earth Day?

Earth Day is an annual event on April 22 to demonstrate support for environmental protection. First held on April 22, 1970, it now includes a wide range of events coordinated globally by EARTHDAY.ORG (formerly Earth Day Network) including 1 billion people in more than 193 countries. The official theme for 2024 is "Planet vs. Plastics." 2025 will be the 55th anniversary of Earth Day. It includes a wide range of events and activities arranged by Earthday.org. Check out their website for more info - Earth Day: The Official Site | EARTHDAY.ORG

Planets vs Plastics

The theme this year for Eath Day is Planet vs Plastics

Did you know?

• Global plastics has reached an estimated 460 million metric tons in recent years;

• It is estimated that 75 to 199 million tons of plastic are currently in our oceans;

• One million plastic bottles are purchased every minute worldwide, while up to five trillion plastic bags are used a year;

Earthday.org have a goal to reduce plastics by 60% by 2040 (60X40).

At GoodGym we are very active in litter picks and keeping our outdoor spaces clean and clear, we get involved in helping community groups with restoring their nature areas back to useable spaces as well as supporting conservation groups with their projects....but can we do more?

Check out this toolkit for some ideas -

EarthDay-2024-Toolkit-March-12th-Update.pdf

So after all this information on Earth Day 2024 and completing our task this evening, we did a mini fitness session in the playground - after all it's important to keep ourselves active and fit! The team did really well in the circuits based exercises which consisted of ladder exercises; med ball throws and slams; kettlebell swings; cone to cone running and good old fashioned playground hopping and jumping!

We will be sad to see Hamid leave Slough. We hope you will come and visit us and we are always here to help you Hamid so please keep in touch.

And finally….. huge congratulations to Ricky on his London Marathon race yesterday! He smashed it with a new marathon personal best as well as a huge time off his half marathon timing!! And he looked fresh as a daisy when Harsha and I saw him at mile 23(ish) with the GoodGym cheer squad! We are all so proud you!

Next week we will be meeting at Salt hill activity Centre, in Salthill park, Bath Rd, SL1 3SS. Our task is to help Raggy Rd Allotments with their allotment space. We will be walking or running down to the allotments.

This evening we were doing a spot of gardening for St Mary’s Farnham Royal Primary school. The task was to tidy up bed number 2 and get it ready for the children to do some planting. This area of the playground is used by the children as part of their learning garden and like any other garden it needs a bit of TLC.

There was no run for this task as the location of the school didn’t have an accessible road where we could park then run so we made it a ‘make your own way’ session.

But we did have a fitness session lined up!

Great to have Zoe join us on her first Slough session. Thank you for coming along.

And it’s was so so good to see Mehdi return back to this area. His journey from Slough to the Bibby Stockholm barge and back to Hounslow has been a painful one and we have very much have missed having him at the sessions. In the background we had lots of the Slough members petition our local MP for his help in getting Mehdi taken off the barge plus we started an online petition.

I hope all our efforts somehow triggered Mehdi being taken off the barge and bought back closer to us. For this we are very grateful. We even had a rainbow over us tonight celebrating his return.

Easy-Peas-y

With all the rain we’d had recently the task was a nice easy one. Digging up the weeds and turning over the soil was easy peas-y! Nothing beets a bit of gardening. Lucky Peter had bought some ‘adult’ tools but the kiddy sized spades were just as good for us shorter ones!

Within 35 minutes we had completed the task and made it look totally radishing!

Thyme for some fitness!

With kettlebells, med balls and resistance bands as our kit we had 3 sets of 4 exercises on a rep range of 8. Everyone did very well with the root-ine!

Then we finished off with a best out of 5 basketball shots! Hamid and Peter drew at 2 each and went head to head for a final play off!

Ruth took the photo of the night! I never knew I could have flying feet whilst throwing a ball!

Thank you to everyone for coming down tonight to help.

Next week is Earth Day so we will be back at St Mary’s primary school doing something good for the soil!

Be great to see you there!

https://www.goodgym.org/v3/sessions

Tonight's task was to help St Mary's primary school with a fence painting task and leaf sweep of their reception playground area.

And as soon as we saw the fence we knew we were going to have a gate-ole time! With 5 colours to paint, it made sense to have 5 team members on this task with the remaining team on the sweeping task.

I could see how eager Hamid was to get stuck in! He even took his shoes off so they wouldn't get dirty! Top man for thinking of that (I was on sweeping duty but still managed to get paint on my trainers!).

Why did the fence go to art school? It wanted to brush up on it's picket skills!

So in order of fence panels we had:-

• Pam painting a blue-tiful shade of blue;

• Jean was caught red handed with her strawberry red shade;

• Mehdi was climbing to the sun in his yellow-vator;

• Peter hoped that there would be no purple rain tonight;

• Hamid was green with envy looking at everyone else's painting skills

Well done to Team Rainbow for doing such a great job

Meanwhile, in the naughty corner we had Chrissy; Sutyee; Agnija and me doing an un-be-leaf-ably good job of sweeping all the fallen leaves into mini piles and then bagging them! There was deffo no gossiping going on - just pure hard work! Team Sweep did good!

Next week we are at the allotments for our penultimate task before the dark nights start at 6:30! (That time is coming soon!)

This evening's task had so much going on! Firstly, a warm welcome to newcomers Tim, Sama and Hamid and the lovely ladies from GoodGym Windsor and Maidenhead - Jess, Sophie and Sheila. Thank you all for coming along to the session and a special one at that.

Thank you to Chrissy for hosting our 5th birthday task at St Mary's Farnham Royal Church of England Primary School. We managed to get a fair few tasks completed tonight including the learning garden, the play area and the side garden.

Hat's off to Team Dr who with cutting hedge technology chopped back the shrubbery to expose the window and security camera! Everyone was rooting for him to cut it back as sometimes trees crowd and well, let's face it, someone has to grow! Well done to Sheila, Jess, Sophie, Nimi and Jenni who all worked really hard on clearing this area.

So good to have Keira back with us...it's been too long. Team Sutyee had Keira and Ruth weeding the playground area.

Whilst over in the learning garden Team Harsha had Jean, Abdulaziz, Mehdi, Hamid, Sama, Tim, Pam and Kam clearing up the bed edges and deciphering the weeds from the plants (thank goodness we have keen gardeners in the group who know the difference).

Peter took on the lone ranger task of removing all the weeds along the perimeter of the school! And what a phenomenal job he did too!

Forty odd minutes in and we were all done....everyone keen and eager for the fitness session (or maybe I just imagined that).

We had games, circuits, confusion, basketball hooping, leg exercises, (hatred for me)... you name it...we worked it tonight.

The finale were the cakes, sing song and speech (you'll be glad to know that I didn't sing...and only did a tiny speech).

Thank you so much to all 21 team members who made our 5th birthday task so special.

Now onto our summary of the year in action.

Hi Year 5

Five years in and what can I say that hasn’t been said before. This group only exists because of YOU and your dedication to GoodGym Slough. We have community in the heart of everything we do. We are diverse, we are open to all, we target groups that need the help and we do it all with such passion and love. And we continue to grow with new members joining us and finding new task owners.

Since launching in July 2018, we have tallied a total of 4240 Good Deeds! We’ve helped over 30 local groups and charities with tasks ranging from gardening to litter picking to flyering to painting to marshalling to packing and stacking, sorting and storing. You name it, we've done it.

So what have we been up to in the year leading to us turning 5...here is a little reminder in the only way we write with GoodGym - with puns!

• We gave a lidl help to local residents with shopping tasks;

• We were rooting for all our new gardening projects;

• We had a Ra-leigh good thyme at the spring, summer sessions at the allotments;

• Our art will always go on with the help we've given to Artful hub with indoor painting, leaflet distributing and what a crate job we did too with helping Eva move units;

• Jen did a great job of b'rambling on with her BBOWT tasks at Haymill Nature Reserve;

• Save - a - life : Surrender your knife was probably our most emotional task this year;

• We surfed the net-work with many networking events in Slough promoting all things GoodGym Slough;

• Christmas was a time for happy holly-days as we finished the year with our annual hamper wrap with Slough Outreach and called it a day till the infamous January challenge!;

• We marshalled our way through the year with tasks at junior parkrun as the cheer squad, sleighing with Santa at the Burnham Parade, stalling it at the Cippenham fayre and sharpening our knowledge with the Knife Angel task;

• The Golden Girls were formed after another epic task at Thames Hospice care. The jackets even made a cameo appearance at junior parkrun last Sunday;

• Let us spray with all the new Churches we have supported this year. From St Paul's to St Marys to St John the Baptist;

• Slow Ways or is it Slough Ways? We verified the route from Slough to Eton. Enjoyed a coffee in Eton then re-routed ourselves back to base;

• Acting like kids at the schools we helped tidy up (especially tonight);

• Decluttering Slough of the hoard of litter litter-ally everywhere!;

As for the races, this year we have glowed, beat a boat and run backwards (not literally). We started off with the Dorney 10k Glow in the Dark run at which Gauri did her first ever 10k distance. Followed by a little run around Paris with Ricky where he got his marathon PB and I ate loads of cakes at each water station. Loosely followed by a backwards route run in London with Harsha - never forget that night out! And our final escapade was a 10k run along the River Thames trying to beat a boat with Jenny, Claire and Ricky!

Reward with Awards

Most memorable task - Knife Angel

As 5 of us guarded the Knife Angel and guided visitors around the Angel... who could forget the mum that lost her son in a case of mistaken identity to a knife crime? Not a dry eye that day.

Most Impactful task - Slough Refugee Support

Our most impactful task this year have been the ones we have carried out with Slough Refugee Support English Class. The class participants have very much enjoyed doing something back for the community and 4 of their members have even joined us now on our weekly Group Runs.

Best Race - Beat the Boat

What a brilliant concept of a race, run by a local runner and delivered in a simple yet effective way. Ok, it's not a PB type of event but it was full of camaraderie, support and fun (and processo!)

Biggest contributor - Jen

Wow! what hasn't Jen done this past year? From group runs at both Slough and Windsor and Maidenhead, plus missions and task force ownership of the monthly task with BBWOT, she racked up the good deeds - WELL DONE JEN

Best Photography session - Allotments

Our monthly visit to the allotments is not only a pure strength session of digging, lifting, wheelbarrowing soil, it's also one where we get our best shots (photo type not drinking!)

Best Dressing award – Burnham Lions Christmas Fayre

We all looked adora-bell in our Santa hats and baubles

Best Grit and Effort award – Ujala Foundation garden sessions

So much to do such little thyme, pure effort was needed on this mini project back in March.

Best Community Award - King's Coronation Weekend - The Big Help Out

Our collaboration task with Slough Bid and St Mary's Church led to a 30 plus turnout including residents and local business on a litter pick around Slough Town centre.

Cheers to five years...here's to many more

What a lovely evening we had tonight at Chrissy's school, as she acted as GoodGymer and Task Owner. It's been a while since we last came here and the Thursday Gardening Club had been busy planting carrots, peas and garlic, however the area was looking a little overgrown-up so it was time for the big people to come in and give it some tough love.

We each made our own way to this beautiful school tucked away in the country lanes. On arrival, Chrissy gave us the tools and a briefing on the areas to work on. Jean got started straight away whilst Jen was cutting it fine with the strimmer. Chrissy and I started on the large bed. The ground was fairly solid, so we had to dig deep to unroot the weeds.

Peter came along with a tool beyond all tools and scraped off all the weeds in the paved areas! Top job!

As Sut arrived we were around ¾ of the way through the first bed and it was looking great! She helped to finish off the left-over weeds (the ones we deliberately left as they were too hard) and then bagged up all the discarded weeds. Her favourite part of tonight was having wheely good fun with the wheelbarrow.

As we finished the task, we took a little liking to the skip in the car park. It was like our own scavenger hunt as we found gnomes (?); folders; wallets; books (really big ones); lamps and a ruler beyond any measure I've seen before! As 8 o'clock approached we were saved by the bell from the church across the road reminding us that it was in fact 'home time'

We are back to our usual Monday night slots again now as there are no more Bank Holidays now till August! Next week we will be helping St Paul's Church on Stoke Rd with another gardening task.

Tonight was our return task to St Mary’s primary school to finish off the third planter in the allotment garden.

And thank goodness for that day of rain we had last week! Planters 1 and 2 had been like digging into concrete whereas todays planter was soft and easy to turnover!

We made this task a community mission over a group run as it was located down a lovely country lane but one we felt was safer to drive to.

On arrival task owner James let us in and escorted us to other slide where the play area was.

Abdul and Pam got to work on the left hand side whilst Gauri and I did the right.

Kam wanted to give last weeks planter another go over and get all the deep rooted weeds out.

Sandy then cracked on with the middle section.

With 6 of us digging away the task was done in no thyme leaving us 15 minutes to get a fitness session in.

With a clock and footprints already set up in the play ground we had the perfect power based games!

We even had a few minutes spare to climb the doomed climbing frame for a photo slide show!

Next week we are helping Slough Refugee Support with their outdoor space. Hope to see you there!