After the hottest week so far this summer, the weather returned to normal this morning where the temperature dropped and it was raining. This didn’t damper the spirits of 12 Goodgymer’s who headed first to Southsea Parkrun to celebrate Katie’s 100th run. The rain certainly didn’t affect the runners and 4 celebrated new 5k pbs. Well done to Angela, Judy, Maura and Vicki . Great running all.

As our community mission today was walkable from parkrun it gave us the opportunity and time to have a celebratory ice cream from the pier and some of Angela’s cinnamon bread and Tracey’s cakes. I mean its breakfast right?

Our task today was to help a social care charity who want to create a sensory garden for their residents. Before this can be done they needed help to remove an old flowerbed, a smoking shelter and do some painting. Once arriving and being offered hot drinks we tackled the flowerbed removal and shelter first as it was still raining.

Demolition Men

Tony and John started with the dismantling of the old smoking shelter which was fastened very well to the wall and ground. They first started to be methodical to remove the holding screws and then remove the parts but it turned out to be more stubborn that anticipated and they resorted to sheer brute force to remove the roof and then supports.

Getting diggy with it

The rest of us tackled the flowerbed, we removed any plants that could be saved on the advice from our resident gardener Judy and placed them into any spare flowerpots they had. Angela, Katie, Maura, Jo, Sarah & Vicki started to remove the rotten sleepers that held the structure together and put them outside for collection later. The earth that was in the flowerbed was very compact so it took a number of us to take turns with spades to break the earth down so that it could be carried to the front in bags and emptied out into a larger bag. Sam, Rachel and Tracey did a great job moving the dirt from the back garden to the front. Tony and John helped us with the final part of the flowerbed removal by carrying large amounts of soil to the front and we started to clear up the area where the flowerbed was.

Seeing the difference it made once the flowerbed had been removed was amazing, we couldn’t believe how much soil was actually in there. We unfortunately ran out of time to do any painting but we’ll arrange another community mission to finish that off and also assist with putting up some storage units.

A very dirty and enjoyable day was had by all