A beautiful summers evening (finally) for this weeks Group Run to Agnes Riley Gardens. Our task this week was to clean up a pond of weed and litter and make a staircase for baby frogs to get out of the ponds. We headed off just after 7 for a uphill slog to the south circular 🥵

Upon arriving we were greeted and promptly split into two groups - heavy work or delicate work. Heavy work entailed digging out two submerged pots from the pond, removing pots when they were light enough, taking soil to the compost area, collecting stones and finally building a stone staircase for the frogs to leave the pond. Joao, Inny, Katy, Lindy, Nathan and Shauna took this job.

Delicate work involved fishing, raking, scooping weeds out of the big pond, searching through them for tadpoles and throwing the tadpoles back in the water.

Once we were done we headed back to Brixton, this time a little bit cooler and a nice bit of downhill!

On a sunny Sunday morning, eight GoodGymers found themselves in a quiet neighborhood behind Kennington station, ready for a grueling gardening session. 🌱

We welcomed newbies: Ed as well as Suzanna, who came along with Rachel. 👋

Alex, the task owner, had brought over the tools and wheelbarrows to move the piles of woodchip set all out in the park. There were five massive piles of woodchip that needed to cover the edge of the park in the hope of covering the weeds would kill them and bring moisture to the terrible soil. 🌳

We split into teams of two: Ed and Sarah took on the first pile, Rachel and Suzanna had another, Claire and Alex took on the third and finally, Lici, Rebecca and Sam worked on the fourth pile. The fifth one was being looked after by local volunteers who came out to help. 💪

Helped with some Sunday morning tunes, the team smashed it by completely shifting and mulching three out of the five piles of woodchip in an hour and a half! 😳 it's no easy feat!

The session ended with a group photo and Alex took everyone to collect some ripen fruit. 🍎🍐🍓

Michael and Sam walked over from Kennington Park litter picking session to Thorlands to find Ellie, Lindy and Rachel outside the Walled Garden at Thorlands! It was Ellie's first ever GoodGym session as she wanted to check it out since she lived close by. It was great to meet you and welcome to GoodGym! Although, it wasn't Rachel's first GoodGym session, it was her first good deed in over two years (or so) and first session at Thorlands.

After the first 15 minutes spent waiting and talking about GoodGym and Thorlands, we gather all the tools and went into Thorlands "Forest" garden to continue with where we left off last week. It was a stark contrast as the week before we have five tasks going on at the same time as we had eleven GoodGymers. However, this time, despite the lower numbers (5), we made sure we concentrated on finishing off two tasks we couldn't finish from the time before.

Lindy and Michael started on trimming back the bindweed near the "Forest" garden entrance whilst Ellie, Rachel and Sam used secateurs and the lopper to cut the buddleia branches into smaller and more manageable pieces to feed the compost heap as well as trim the more woody pieces into pea sticks for the "Walled" garden. Once Lindy and Michael were done trimming, they joined the rest of the team to finish off clearing all the buddleia. The hour session flashed by as we discussed about our weekend plans and had a few hostilities about Six Nations allegiance 👀

It's great to see the project slowly developing and there's more to be done on Wednesday night during our group run! Thanks for all those who came today and it was great to see newbies to Thorlands - Ellie and Rachel. I hope to see you soon either at Thorlands or another GoodGym session.