After some very wholesome plant-dealing in the FCC car park, we made our return to PARCS, this time to tidy up their front garden.

Nia and Maura met us at the task and had already cleared a significant amount of litter before the running squad had even arrived!

Katie was back as our bin-jumper-in-chief and Dave was so inspired he even had a turn at the end of the session.

I think there were new levels of euphemism reached this evening - I am genuinely impressed. Not sure there was anything quite PG enough for the Run Report this evening!

The team made swift work of pruning the hedge and de-weeding the driveway - I'm sure the team will be very impressed when they're back in the morning!

Many hands made light work of our task tonight at PARCS. Their peaceful garden was quite overgrown with dandelions and bluebells has taken over the path, so we set to work stripping back and tidying.

Fact of the Week came from Dave - I didn't know it was illegal to pick bluebells out in the wild! This is due to their endangered status, with over 50% of the world's bluebells being in the UK.

Katie did her best Oscar the Grouch impression whilst stomping down all the garden detritus in to the green waste bin. Nia and Sam were on hand to clean up after we traipsed the waste through the main building - thanks guys!

We had to stop Laura and Tracey from making a start on the weeding in the driveway area as we've been booked to come back to PARCS in a few weeks time to tackle this area! Their eagerness to help and not waste a minute of GG Task Time was wonderful to see!

Congratulations to Jane for hitting 50 Good Deeds this evening! Welcome to the realms of GoodGym Royalty.

We had walkers, runners and cyclists this evening heading back to Diana House for some weeding action. Check out Katie's Before and After shots, you can really see the difference.

Judy's passion for mindless finicky weeding really came through tonight so even the tiniest little weeds couldn't escape.

A nest of spiders was also unearthed during our task, it was like a scene from a teeny tiny horror movie. Hopefully nobody took any waifs and strays home with them...

We made it in time (!) and got through to the back garden where we were faced with lots of huge dandelions, weeds covering the path and a willow that had gone beyond weeping and was starting to veer into triffid territory!

We were very pleased to see that Jen's work on the buddleia a few years ago was work done well and there were no signs of it returning!

Katie London did some excellent (and maybe health & safety breaking) compacting of the branches in the brown bin.

Angela made good use of Jo's folding branch saw and took down lots of the willow branches.

Rosie identified the plants vs weeds and Wilson worked so hard that she wore a hole in her glove.

An hour's work and we'd made a huge difference to the garden, it looks much more inviting and hopefully it'll be well used by the clients of PARCS.

Milestones: Tonight was Tony's 200th good deed and we also got to see Dave's new black t-shirt celebrating his 50th good deed last week. Tony's 200th t-shirt will be on display soon...

We started the evening with some treats from Raleigh to celebrate the new partnership between them and GoodGym and we finished the evening by announcing that Harry has been chosen to be one of the GG / Raleigh ambassadors. Great for them and for us!

We had 3 groups heading to PARCS tonight... "meet you there", "chat pace" and "mid pace".

Unfortunately no-one was there to greet us and let us through to the back garden 😕 but fortunately there was a fair bit of weeding and rubbish clearance to do in the front driveway so we were still able to do them a bit of a favour and also had plenty of opportunity to catch up with each other. Great to see so many faces and also to have some sunshine!

Wilson showed excellent determination in litter retrieval from under the hedges and Mick tried to make his good deeds count as much as his t-shirt suggested by attacking the weeds with vigour! Secateurs were repurposed for digging out weeds and rubbish & the brown bin was pretty full by the time we finished.

I've emailed the person who we arranged this with so so hopefully we will manage to get another date in to get grips with the garden!

Don't forget that it's the London Marathon on Sunday so send all your best running positive thinking to Dave who will be covering the 26.2 miles.

Lockdowns and warm/wet weather meant that the PARCS garden was in need of a bit of attention.

Who you gonna call? GoodGym Weedbusters!

We quickly filled the brown bin with various greenery, luckily we had Rosie (GG Portsmouth's answer to Monty Don) on hand to help us identify the weeds rather than the plants.

Jo had brought her own secateurs so made short work of the brambles for us.

Rachel braved the compost bin and wrestled off the lid (not too many creepy crawlies) so we had another bin to fill.

Jen made friends with the resident snails and gave us a commentary on what they were up to, including a possible house move (shell swap?) and some 18 rated activities not suitable for the run report!

Tracey unintentionally customised her black GG tshirt with a load of sticky green seeds, once we'd looked we noticed that most of us had also been caught by them.

2 bins and about 6 sacks filled and it was time to head home (via Tesco for 3 of us!), just as the rain started to fall, I'm sure the snails will be pleased!