Five Good Gym-ers in red t-shirts, and a few hundred angry ants also wearing red met up at the Dry Arch, Middle Ground Growers this weekend to clear weeds, slugs and earth around promising new tree saplings in the Tree Nursery buried at the very back of the community allotment.

Emily K, Meyrick, Art, Holly, myself and Zoe from the More Trees BANES charity gloved up and crawled on hands and knees in between the trees to remove (a specific type of weed I have clean forgotten) pesky overgrowth that was putting the new saplings future at risk! Very dramatic.

A lovely morning up a windy hill, with an equally lovely view over Bath, definitely worth a visit!

Welcome

A warm welcome to our latest recruit at GoodGym Bath - Rob .

The mission

This was first of two digging themed missions for GoodGym on a pleasant Easter Saturday in Bath.

Max, Helen, Emily and Jer met up with Rob and our host Hamish at Middle Ground Growers in Bathampton for a spot of earth-moving. The site might be familiar to regulars as Dry Arch.

The task involved levelling off the earth at the site of the area's back gate, which is being decommissioned. The path through the gateway had a big bank of earth at either side (at least one of which has clearly been deliberately moved there in the not too distant past when the gate was installed, hopefully not by an unsuspecting GoodGym group...) and we had to effectively move earth from the higher sides into the gap in the middle to eventually level everything off.

We were given a selection of digging tools to pick (and shovel) from, and set to work. Socially distancing by splitting into sub-groups on each side of the gap.

Progress was slow as we dug our way through hard dry top layers, and claggy clay infultrated by huge chunks of masonry, bits of barbed wire, old pottery and so on.

Emily and Helen formed a sub-team fetching bark chips from another part of the site ready to be laid on the top of our newly levelled area - though to be honest, one session turned out to be not nearly enough for the this epic task, and we hope to maybe be invited back some time to help finish the job.

We finished up at 1 o'clock, giving Rob, Helen and Jer plenty time to make it over to Bath City Farm for the second mission of the day (see Bark, bark, black sheep)