The GoodGym Nottingham volunteers came together on 10th December for their annual festive social at Bustler, Sneinton Market.

With rounds of mulled wine, other alcoholic and non-alcoholoc beverages, and tasty food from Bustler's streetfood stalls, we marked another year-full of helping organisations and projects around Nottingham and various milestones achieved.

As always, conversation and debate flowed, with the key questions of the night:

"How is it that several group members had not seen Home Alone and is this really as shocking as some thought?"

"What is the best apple?"

"When is a berry not a berry?" (for the benefit of those not at the previous years Christmas social)

A big thank you to everyone who attended (and to Rose and Vytautas who made a brief surprise appearance before joining their rival party). We hope everyone has a lovely, relaxing break and we're looking forward to more good deeds in 2026 (we've already got loads of tasks booked in, check them out and sign up here.)

It was back to the food bank in The Meadows for eight Goodgymers last night. Mark from the food bank soon had us organised and so we set to work. Hannah, Bozena and Aj set to organising stock. Meanwhile some generous donations meant a number of pallets where stacked higher than Peter so Matt (six at a time!), Scott, Tom and Kevin got stuck in to moving tuna, mandarin segments and rice puddings by the dozen upstairs. Some would say this was good Hyrox training if anyone had somehow got themselves roped in to one (not looking at Tom in particular!) but was definitely a good workout for everyone there!

And the award for most delayed report goes to…

Anyways! Six of us head to Arkwright Meadows Community Gardens again for a slightly cooler evening of gardening.

This time we were tasked with clearing a big patch of nettles as well as clearing bindweed from a couple of the beds. As the quote from Nigel in the title suggests, this was a bit trickier than our normal "smash and dash" approach to weeding. Katie from the gardens explained to us that the bindweed roots go incredibly deep and incredibly far, but you need to get the whole thing to stop it coming back. There was a lot of digging around and delicately pulling the whole thing out to keep us busy for an hour.

Shoutout to Tom for hitting 99 good deeds!!!

The latest heatwave didn’t put off 7 GoodGym Nottingham volunteers as we headed to Green’s Windmill and Science Centre for this week’s task. We hadn’t been to the Windmill for a task for some time so it was nice to be back in their beautiful garden which was just perfect for a warm summer’s evening.

Jamie met us on arrival and opened up the science centre so that we could park our bikes inside. We then set to work on weeding and tidying the pathways in between the raised beds. As much as we love gardening tasks involving heavy duty tool-wielding, chopping, pruning brambles etc, we all agreed that a gentle evening pulling up weeds was perfect for such a warm day as we were all pretty low on energy. It also meant that we didn’t have to use much brain-power in deciding what was and wasn’t a weed as we just needed to pull up anything that was not in a bed.

Alongside the weeding, Nat also took on the task of picking up several apples which had fallen from the trees into the garden, separating out the ones which could potentially still be sold as windfall.

After an hour, we were satisfied that all the garden paths appeared to be weed and apple free and we were ready to head on home to cool off. Before we did, we had our usual group picture plus a special one of AJ with the Windmill’s solar panels. He had been involved in a project at work which had contributed to the installation of these panels a few years ago, but had not had the opportunity to come and see them for himself until now. A perfect way to celebrate what was his tenth Goodgym task - well done AJ!