It never rains but it pours...

In the starkest contrast ever, having considered cancelling our session at St Nicholas's Primary school a fortnight ago due to heat, yesterday we were worrying about whether to go ahead in driving wind and rain. We're made of tough stuff, us GoodGymers, and surely Brits can't cancel due to rain? - We'd never get anything done!

This was our third and final (for now) session taming the school vegetable plot ready for the gardening club to start. This time we'd earmarked the bramble and burdock between the outside beds and the polytunnel to clear, and some extra weeding and tidying inside the polytunnel. 7 of our All Star team weeded out bramble an bind weed and dug over the polytunnel beds, while 2 of the madder GoodGymers braved the rain to tackle the head-height burdock and tangle of bramble outside.

An hour's work had the polytunnel looking spic and span, and the spikey corner outside cleared.

Soggy all through our layers and squelching shoes, we nonetheless enjoyed a run back through Marston post-task. Let's call it character building and a bonding experience?

Last night we returned to the vegetable plots of St Nicholas' Primary School in Marston.

Having started to tame the jungle that was St Nicholas' Primary veggie garden a couple of months ago we were able to make further progress on weed-pulling, hedge trimming and nettle carnage last night. Most of the veggie beds had been covered with weed membrane before they got out of control, so pulling weeds up was largely a fairly easy job. A delightful scent was provided by the rampaging mint plants - almost covering up the smell of sweaty bodies working in the sunshine! In our alloted hour we mostly cleared the growing beds of weeds, lopped the hedge back a bit more, and pulled up much of the nettle border, so it's very close to being ready for use by the school. The plan will be for each year group to have a bed to grow vegetables, learning gardening skills and providing valuable therapeutic outdoor time. The crops will be used for cooking as well as selling the produce.

We have another visit booked in a fortnight's time when we will get the last of the nettles pulled out and tackle the section between the beds and the polytunnel.

I'm glad to see that there are some therapeutic uses for stinging nettles given the number of stings I got last night! https://www.mountsinai.org/health-library/herb/stinging-nettle

Plus, medical uses for chilli, as discussed: https://www.webmd.com/vitamins/ai/ingredientmono-945/capsicum

It's always a school day!

Welcome to GoodGym Hannah.

Alistair at Marston Community Gardeners put us in touch with St Nicholas' Primary School in Marston as their vegetable plot and polytunnel had got out of hand. It seems like the project was originally going really well, then Covid lockdowns happened and before they knew it the plot was overgrown and daunting to get back into a usuable state.

To be honest, we had NO IDEA what we were getting ourselves into until we walked into the school playground, squirmed through a gap in the hedge, and were met with a jungle of bramble, bindweed and various Unidentified Growing Objects. Well, never a team to give up before we've started, we gamely pulled on gardening gloves, armed ourselves with loppers and got to work. Once started we made pretty fast progress. Weed matting had been laid in the outside areas, so much of the vegetation actually came up quite easily (no digging required). Once we'd cleared a route through to the beds and compost bins the outside jungle started to look tamed quite quickly. Likewise, inside the polytunnel the weeds came up without too much digging so it looked ship-shape within an hour. Overall this is definitely going to require a few more visits before it's back to it's former glory, but we left the polytunnel ready to use, the entrance cleared, and the whole plot in a better state. Hopefully the school will start to use the polytunnel, and the outside areas can be back in full use by next spring.

Congratulations on reaching the 10 Good Deeds milestone Steve!

Good to meet you Imogen - hope you enjoyed your 1st GoodGym evening.