On another glorious Saturday morning, five goodgymers got their red t-shirts on and helped two parkruns happen for the hundreds of people who took part. Miriam, Jacqueline, Louise and Ryan took on various roles at Edgbaston Reservoir, as they had a good hundred or more runners on the day due to neighbouring Cannon Hill being cancelled this week. John set up the course at Perry Hall, but only got a chance to photograph the event sign rather than happy volunteer faces, where the nearby Sandwell Valley parkrun was cancelled due to UB40 playing (hence the pun), but happily had a limited effect on numbers.

Rob, Rachel, Jackie and Fiona met up for the first time in many months at Trinity Close to help the residents weed and tidy their communal rose garden.

It was lovely to see everyone and some of the residents came out to help, chat and have a laugh. We all got stuck in and before long it was time to go , time flies when you are with friends having weedy good fun.

We will be back next week for more hard work.

Last night Rachel, Rob and Jackie went along to prepare the allotment ready for lockdown 2.0.

Upon arrival we were thinking about what we could achieve as it was a lot darker than we thought it would be. Thankfully Rachel had brought along two camping lights and Rob had a head torch – so enough light to guide the way to our patch.

It became clear quite quickly that there wasn't a lot we could achieve without more natural light and a lack of new membrane to put down!

We did notice that some of the membrane had come un-stuck so Rob was set the task to go and find more bricks to help keep it in place – luckily there were one or two around. Jackie and Rachel placed the bricks strategically to try and keep the membrane down – and hope that it stays secure until we can return with more pegs.

As we are now in lockdown 2.0, we’re not entirely sure when that will be, but keep an eye out for the latest info and hope to see you when we’re back up and running. It will be interesting to see how the allotment holds up in our absence!

Stay safe,

Jackie and Fiona arrived at the allotment to meet Sheldon who was already tooled up and ready to go, thankfully the membrane was still down from previous weeks!

We got to work on another section which had over overgrown since we cleared it all a few weeks ago. Sheldon and Fiona got to work digging and turning over the soil whilst Jackie got to work on the edges making a lovely pile to throw on the compost heap.

We then got to work putting more membrane down and securing with bricks from one of the other allotment users Ron. The last job of the day was to sprayed weed killer on the rest of the patch in the hope it would work miracles.

We will see what it looks like in a few weeks when we are back again to carry on the great work.

Due to unforeseen circumstances, our original community mission had to be cancelled last minute but never deterred, we decided to still do some good in the form of a litter pick in Brueton Park.

Rob, Jackie, Liam and Fiona were excited to get picking as we hadn’t done a litter pick in quite a while - too busy with other tasks! We started off in the surrounding area of the car park, as we always find quite a bit of rubbish around there. This quickly turned into a bit of an adventure, as we wandered into the nature reserve area that we haven’t been to before! Liam led the way which involved climbing over some fallen tree branches and walking through some muddy areas - we were well and truly off the beaten path and managed to almost fill two bags of rubbish.

Jackie was also on her own mission tonight to see the shooting stars in the park, but due to the clouds and the option of a socially distanced drink at our old meeting place, she didn’t get to see them!

We will be back doing good again this weekend at our adopted allotment, it would be great to see you there.