Turns out Summer's coming back late so this evening's task(s) were all about getting the trees in Cator Park ready for the heatwave.

First up, most of us met at the Bridge House, shared our fave Disney/childhood films and hit the road. It was lovely to be joined by first-timers Egle and James - thanks for joining 😊

At Cator, we met a bunch of the friends team and a gaggle of GoodGymers who were already deep in watering mode. We split into a couple of groups, tackling different tasks:

The weeding crew were yanking up weeds around the new saplings we helped to plant - we didn't want the weeds taking the precious water away from the tree. James was on nettle-shearing duty and we had a few forks to help out, but most of it came up fairly easily by hand.

Then the watering crew were scooping up water from the string via a handy pulley system, trying to avoid fish/shrimps/whatever the hell that thing was, and distributing it around the willow arch and freshly weeded saplings.

Trees are a precious thing to the people of the area, after the recent massacre, so it was nice to be able to keep these ones going and growing.

Well done you lovely bunch.

p.s. pic of Skin Soft because it's apparently the bees knees when it comes to not getting bitten?!

It was apple-solutely delightful to have 11 A* weeders and mulchers this evening for a brand new task at Mayow Park. Some new faces (welcome Karl!) and some old faces (no offence, Shauna).

We met at the Bridge House, shared our favourite genres of music - OMG we have an eclectic bunch - and then hit the road.

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Alona was there to meet us with tools at the ready. We split into two groups:

🍂 Ria, Shauna, David and Harry were on team mulch - shoveling the good stuff into wheelbarrows and running it across the park.

🍎 On team orchard were Sandra, Kat, Michelle, Millie, Karl and Clare - yanking up the grass and weeds around the apple trees so the mulch could be put down (which stops the weeds taking the water and goodness in the soil and provides extra nutrients to the soil).

It turns out Alona is full of knowledge when it comes to fruit trees, explaining all about the fungus in the soil, the comfrey surrounding the trees (which is a nitrogen fixer!?) and the different types of apples. Very interesting!

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Way to grow!

The Friends of Mayow Park help to maintain the park and they don't often have big teams like GoodGym, so even in the 45 minutes we were there, we made a big difference to 6 trees and Alona was very grateful for our help. Hopefully we'll be back!

Nice one team! 💪

11 massive legends came out this Monday evening for a task at the History-tastic Crystal Palace Museum Water Tower. 💦🔥

We met at the Bridge House and it was lovely to have 4 fresh faces with us (Nice one for joining Sandra, Millie, Michelle & Harry 👍👏🤝🙌) . We discussed our favourite juices (which inspired some post-session-pub beverages...) and set off up the hill.

John was there to meet us with a large selection of tools and his mass of knowledge. We split into different sections of the tower and began making a production line which looked something like this:

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🍂

🛒↔️

💩

🪣

After smashing through 30 minutes of scraping, yanking, shaking and bagging, we'd made another serious dent in the excavation. John then told us all about the history of the tower, why the top was knocked off and also a hint about the plans to turn it into an accessible place for the public to visit.

We jogged back down the hill and did some stretches to finish.

Amazing job team ✊