For this community mission, it was a 7-minute walk from home to help out the wonderful people of the Friends of Kennington Park by setting up the 3rd annual Kennington Park Festival.

Along with a large group of willing and committed volunteers, I arrived to help set up gazebos, blow up balloons (a lot of lung power required!), attach bunting, set up tables/chairs and helping to erect a tee-pee style tent for the organisation Trees For Cities.

Once the set-up was complete I stayed until 3 pm to take in the festival, visit the various stalls, and see some of the entertainment.

On a grey but mild Sunday afternoon, four GoodGymers joined the Friends of Kennington Park in the beautiful award-winning Old English Garden to do some gardening.

Our task was to tidy up some of the flower beds in the centre of the garden by taking out any loose leaves, sticks and dead plants, taking care not to uproot the new plants that were pushing their way through, or to stand on anything growing.

We got to work and were soon filling up large bags with unwanted weeds and plants, which we then helped to empty onto the compost pile.

From the Friends we learnt that you can replant the broken plants that have growth - and also that unripe green figs are good for making fig syrup!

They were pleased with the progress we (and they!) had made and commented that it looked much better than earlier in the day.

We had a lovely bunch this evening for a bit of dead-heading and a lot of bindweed removal.

We were in Kennington Park where they've got an inspection for the London In Bloom awards tomorrow so they asked us for a little help making this lovely little oasis even more idyllic!

Sarah, Tim, Gayle and I got to work on some dead-heading of some roses whilst everyone else got deep into the bushes to try to defeat our nemesis (bindweed, obvs). It's gone a bit nuts in recent weeks with the sun and the rain and if it takes hold of a plant it can kill it... so even though it's flowers can sometimes be pretty, it's not a welcome customer.

By the end of our time we'd filled up some huge bags with bindweed - an absolutely cracking job done by all. 👏👏👏

Fancy some more bindweeding?! Join us next Tuesday at Myatt's Fields!

Eight of us met up in Kennington Park on the hottest day of the year so far for a spot of gardening 👩‍🌾

After a tour of the park to pick up some litter we headed to some flower beds to do some weeding.

• Alex and Lizzie, both first timers 🥳 were pulling out some grass type plant around the roses.
• Rob (another first timer 🥁), Sarah, Rowan, Jen, Michael and I were pulling out a weed called mouse ear which had taken over a flower bed. We had some chat about and the 5k in Brockwell Park in a few weeks that some of us are running and the return of parkrun hopefully very soon 🤞

After a bit over an hours work in the boiling sun we headed back to the rose garden with the tools and weeds.

After meeting the Friends of Kennington Park team already at work in the ornamental garden, we were led across to the other side of the park for our task. As usual the team needed some help with weeds, thistles and one of our favourites, bind weed.

A quick welcome to our two first timers Jason and Deni who got stuck in with the thistles straight away. Before long, the thistles were all being worked on and we had extra hands, so some of us moved on to the bindweed.

The thistles were fully eradicated, unfortunately we couldn't same for the bindweed which never ends, but we did manage 3 sacks of it.

Friends of Kennington Park were absolutely thrilled to have had us for 90 mins, much longer than usual, and they can't wait to have us back!

It was a bit of a drizzly day but Michael and I headed to give the Friends of Kennington Park a hand at their monthly gardening session.

A bit of an odd task though - cleaning the fountain! Rita sorted us out with something to kneel on and we got to work scrubbing the base of it with a variety of brushes (tooth and washing up) and some fairy liquid (apparently it's good for the granite). After an hour's solid arm work out, we called it a day, with the fountain looking a little shinier for our work!