A bit of a humid one this evening, half of us met at the Bridge House for some favourite letters (S, T, O, O & D - in case you were wondering) and running, and half met at the task.

This evening we were helping out in Cator Park where the willow arch was weeping a bit, so we refreshed it with some water from the stream.

Sarah and Linda did some expert bucket chucking to scoop out water and deposit it into vessels that some of us fed to the willow arch and other beds.

Meanwhile Stephen & Shauna were mulching one of the beds with some woodchip.

Ace work, team 👍

Anyone remember the 90’s TV ad?

I get a chick out of you

First up, we named ourselves and our favourite chicken-y thing from creme eggs to spatchcock to the rooster who’s been waking Catherine up all day!

We also welcomed Mohammed to the crew 👏👏👏👏👏 So great to have you with us.

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Our task was a brand new one for the folks at Dorset Road Allotment. They’ve got an old and overgrown chicken run which they want removed so that they can use the space for community activities.

We met Jaime and Ann from the committee who equipped us with tools from screwdrivers to bolt cutters to shears and we headed round to the chicken run.

It was huge. Harry was convinced something other than the nettles and brambles lived in there. 👹

We cracked on with various tasks:

✂️ Trimming back the nettles and brambles

🛠 Cutting the netting down and rolling it up

💪 Yanking off some big corrugated panels

📢 Moral support

It was kinda dangerous work but everyone got safely stuck in.

I think Mohammed won the prize for energy input! 🏆

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A half-dozen kilometres, some beautiful golden hour snaps from Cat, and a good deed in the bag.

Nice one team 💪

Tonight's session was a Tiny Forest sandwich with two lovely jogs either side.

We kicked off at The Bridge House. Everyone took a guess at the number of people who signed up for the London Marathon this year. 840,000. Molly won. That's more than 1% of the UK population which is a crazy statistic.

Anyway, next up we split in two. Cat led a longer run and we all congregated at the Tiny Forest in Cator Park.

It was looking pretty well mulched but Millie assured us it needed more.

The mulch pile was a fair distance away, so we took turns wheeling and filling up with the good stuff.

I'll be bark.

After a good 45 mins we'd covered half the Tiny Forest and left a decent pile for the other half of the trees. We might even be back to spread a little more next week. We'll see.

Nice job, team! And shout-out to Sarah for joining the Bromley crew for the first time 🙌

Last night, 14 Goodgymmers came out to help out at Galleywall Nature Reserve.

First to arrive at our meeting point, Old Spike, was Steve, who had been away recently. Whilst we caught up, newbie Chong arrived - and then nipped back out to check out a bike shop. Similarly, Isaac came dashing in, only to dash back out to do a quick lap of the Rye. Emma, Sarah, Nelly, Fi, Tim and Katy arrived and stayed 😅

Once everyone had arrived, I started welcome speech, and we gave a proper welcome to Chong. Our ice breaker question this week was related to the task... "Imagine we're going on a nature walk together, what do you see?". Tim started us off with a caterpillar, Chong gave some insight into his favourite sports team, and everyone else built a beautiful scene with a river, a waterfall, some salmon swimming in the river, some light filtering through the trees...🥹. It was a great team effort!

After a quick warm-up, we set off on our 4k run to Galleywall. I think it was the warmest day we've had this year, so it was a sweaty one!

When we arrived at Galleywall, James, Richard, Daryl and Andrada were already there. Eddie from Galleywall welcomed us and explained to us the task: we had to move some logs out of a ditch, and then put them back in a less haphazard manner, so that it would be safe for children.

Even though outcome was clear, we were not certain about how to achieve it initially. Steve came up with the idea of taking everything out the ditch, and then putting the big things back first, to give a stable base, so we rolled with that. We got into pairs and started to self-organise, and we completed the task surprisingly quickly.

Eddie came to inspect out work, and during this, he had the idea to dismantle some of the bug hotels so that people at the bus stop would be able to look through the "windows" to see into the nature reserve. After some discussion and experimentation, we opened up two windows.

At some point Daryl got separately picked to mow the grass.

Just as I started to worry that there may not be enough work for us, Eddie came round with laminated booklets which was a guided nature walk of the nature reserve. We split off into fours and off we went!

We finished at 8pm exactly to run/walk/cycle back to Peckham, perfect timing for our social at Skylarking. 🍻