Great to see such a good-sized team in Bromley-By-Bow for this morning’s activity!

Background to today’s activity

The team were here to join Larry at St Leonard’s Priory Park for some tough gardening tasks!

St Leonard's Priory Park is 'a community led project with Bow Church in Bromley-by-Bow. Boasting a 1000 years of history, this area is being revitalised by local people for local people.' With weekly gardening sessions, picnics and coffee mornings, the idea is to create a beautiful, useful, well-used little park in this corner of East London, that will appeal to local residents and visitors of all ages.

Currently the park hosts a gardening group every Saturday from 11-1, and offers community meals. It's also enjoyed by local school projects, and other programmes supporting some of the younger residents in the Bromley-By-Bow area.

After a short warm-up to prepare for the task, complete with a few useful stretches, we headed over to meet Larry for a briefing on today’s activity.

We were helping build and fill the new vegetable planters ready for a new part of this community project.

Dividing into two groups, the team wasted no time filling wheelbarrows full of soil and compost; foraging for branches and logs and preparing layers in the planters.

(There was even a small bit of DIY involved).

Slowly our team grew as the morning went on, and before we knew it, we were no fewer than 13 battling it out to wheel the last barrow of soil over to the beds.

It was active, it was warm, but it was rewarding.

The time seemed to fly by, and it wasn’t long before we were posing for one final picture and saying cheerio to Larry.

A fantastic effort from everyone on a sunny Friday – well done for all you achieved.