3 GoodGymers – Victoria, Steve, and Alex – caught an hour of green-fingered volunteering today!

Sat on a tree-lined road in Primrose Hill is a care home that's made for a Sunday afternoon drama.

Rathmore House has character and space, and it makes a suitably restful home for 20 older residents.

The three of us jumped to work in the garden, which deserves to be safe and accessible for everyone.

Victoria trimmed the vines back from a box seat, pruned the rose bush (readying it for summer blooms), and pulled oodles of weeds from nooks and crannies!

Steve started with a patch of vines and moved onto sweeping and raking, collecting pile-upon-pile of leaves from the pathways and lawns!

And Alex attempted to keep up with Victoria and Steve!

Thank you, both!!

A return to the care home to continue the work clearing plants in the garden.

Tonight, three GoodGymmers met up in Camden to help a care home clear part of their garden.

Connor, Emily, and I were all running slightly ahead of schedule as we converged on the care home. Having never met each other before, we spent a few minutes introducing ourselves before saying hello to the care home manager.

Thankfully, today's task was very simple: we were to destroy everything! (Or at least everything within a loosely defined area, which is almost as satisfying). This meant that we could largely not care about our impact on the garden, which felt strangely ironic when working in a care home.

Regardless, we cracked on with our semi-wanton destruction. Emily got to grips with clearing the ivy crawling across the floor, Connor made quick work of rooting out a stump in the ground (he swore the ground was like concrete, but the alacrity with which he did it suggests otherwise), and I embraced snapping limbs off trees (discovering, as I did so, a hitherto unknown conditioned response of saying "oops" whenever I snapped something successfully 🤷🏼‍♀️) Although there were several tools available, I was especially glad of the gloves provided, as we largely relied on our hands to clear the area of greenery, snap any overly long sticks, and bag up the debris.

After an hour of work, we had accumulated as many bags of green waste as you could snap a stick in, and decided we had impressed ourselves enough to finish up. We spent a few minutes clearing the tools away, before saying goodbye to our hosts.

It was lovely to meet you, Connor and Emily, and I hope to see you at Camden again soon! 😊

our first time helping out in the care home at Rathbone House for Central and Cecil housing trust. Many hands made lite work of clearing the vegetation and bagging it up to make way fir new decking and planting.

Proceedings we're definitely over shadowed (and rightfully so) by stalwart of the Camden Good Gym and bringer and baker of great cake and snacks Liz's 499th mission.

Slightly later than planned due to the pandemic Liz will be joining the very auspicious 500 club, a huge achievement and something to be proud of!

Next Wednesday we're at Cecil Sharp House helping out in the Garden, sign up to see what snacks Liz brings us! https://www.goodgym.org/happenings/group-run-to-weed-at-cecil-sharp-house

Slight change of plan for this group mission, instead we eneded up helping at Adelaide Road Local Nature Reserve.

Many bags of litter we're collected and trees weeded for the meadow and pathways cleared!

We'll be helping out with the original planned task soon!