Double task night which meant we had a couple of people heading to Florence Green to tackle the watering and the rest of us heading to RUSS Community Housing to tackle the weeding. And a couple of us had just come from TRAID. We were helping so many wonderful organisations last night.

It was Lindsay's 50th good deed this evening. Congratulations, we can't wait to see you sporting that black tshirt soon!!

Onto the tasks both were a short run away. At Florence Green there was lots of watering the saplings.

At RUSS there was lots of heaving lifting! We had soil to shift, giant piles of weeds to shift and woodchip to shift but we got it all done and made excellent progress on the woodchip!

Vic and Sarah made excellent progress on the weeding except when it got too dark and they could no longer tell what was a weed and what was a small tree.

We then created my favourite group run photo ever which was unplanned and then some of us headed to Mamma Dough for some post-group run pizza!

Don't forget we have a lot of weekend sessions at RUSS if anyone fancies it.

It's also definitely head torch time of year now and I will be bringing the lights for outdoor tasks.

I was trying to think of a good pun to celebrate Vic's 450th good deed and Marta's 750th good deed but without the regular pun creator in attendance, I ended up looking at how many good deeds those in attendance last night have done in total and that is a massive 3110* good deeds.

That's such a huge difference we've made in the Borough of Lewisham, from the new faces to the regular faces - you're all amazing!

Back to the task in hand, we were heading to Florence Green to help clear the weeds from around the young trees. The trees that we helped plant! The team got stuck in and tackled all the beds that needed clearing, hopefully that means the saplings will have the best chance of surviving over summer (if summer ever arrives).

It was nearly time to tuck into the celebratory biscuits that Vic had brought but I made everyone hang on a little longer whilst we completed the fiddly task of removing the rabbit shields from the trees and then tying the saplings to the canes in a figure of eight. We even managed to find 2 giant caterpillars. And then it was time for celebratory biscuits!

A short run back to Glass Mill and enough time for a cool down and chat about the task this eve and upcoming group runs.

*stats in case anyone is interested: Marta: 750 Vic: 450 Steve: 560 Kim: 389 Alison: 59 Andy: 2 Darryl: 157 Iitmari: 112 Janet: 2 Julian: 525 Matt: 77 Abi: 27

We marked, sawed and bundled recycled pallet lumber for building planters. There were more volunteers than work, so we finished early. It was difficult to find the place - it was through an overgrown iron door in an alley behind the Lewisham Arthouse.

Sometimes you just don’t have time to finish the task. And that can be great, as Good Gym had to go back to Florence Green to plant the trees we didn’t have time to plant last week. The local volunteers are transforming this little pocket park to make it greener and prettier, and we were there to help.

Having already done a lot of the prep that we needed to get the trees into the ground on a previous visit, only the planting remained. After marking planting spots with canes, roots were soaked in what we were told was a nutrient solution (although it looked suspiciously like wallpaper paste) and the trees placed in a trench. Next was replacing the soil and popping rabbit guards around and before we knew it a very impressive tree line emerged. And after that and a bit of admiration of our work it was time for a well-earned cup of tea.

Deptford high street has been voted one of the coolest streets in the world https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-62693537, and just off one end of it you can find Florence Road, where four of the eternally cool members of Good Gym could be found one Saturday morning.

The task for the day was to plant trees in the small park on the street, and we were soon put to work: first the ground was to be dug over, after which a hugely accurate and not in any way jerry-rigged pair of sticks with attached string was used to measure the right distance for the planting of canes. The preliminary work done, it was time to plant the trees, a mixture of rose hip, hawthorn and 3 others, all of which needed to be dipped in a special solution before being planted and wrapped in a protective casing.

Soon many trees were in the ground and many biscuits had been consumed and Good Gym sashayed our way off into the afternoon.

We arrived a group of 5 today. Had a quick look at all the jobs and got the bulbs to start cracking on with it.

Each tree had roughly 60 bulbs all around it of different flowers which should looked amazing by summer unless the squirls get to it before 🐿