Expecting only Daryl and Sam, Peter was pleasantly surprised to see Emma, Louise and Tracey come along for this Saturday morning lift and shift 30 wood look-a-like plastic planks from Jack Hobbs Club on Brandon Estate to a new community garden on an estate five minutes walk away.

Since Peter had thought it would be just the three of us, he had prepared a makeshift transportation device made out of two trolleys, pallets and some rope. Carrying around 12 planks as a test run for the first trip, the team had to help Peter guide this makeshift cart. Once at the destination, it was a matter of unloading them and stacking in a pile to be used on another date when Peter builds the planters/raised beds for the community garden.

With the first trip working without a hitch, the team went back to get the remaining 18 planks and other bits and bobs. This time transporting them over proved a bit difficult as there was more weight to steer. Yet, once we arrived at the destination we went through the same motion. With this cart and the extra amount of volunteers, we completed the task with 15 minutes to spare!

It was a good-sized group who gathered for today’s task in the Borough, courtesy of Beautiful Balin, a local community garden group, based in-and-around the Tabard Gardens Estate.

We kicked off today’s activity with a workout, useful for blowing away midweek blues.

After a short run to Tabard Gardens, the team wasted no time in selecting their mini-band-of-choice and tackling upper body moves (yes, bicep curl and tricep kickback, we’re looking at you), single leg squats, and some full-on seated calf stretches.

Just as we were finishing up, Peter from Beautiful Balin arrived, complete with sophisticated strategy for today’s leafleting task.

Background

Beautiful Balin are a community-run garden group based on the Tabard Gardens Estate. The Estate’s Spring Festival, supported by Southwark Council, is taking place this Saturday, and the group wanted to reach as many households on the Estate as possible. A free event with food and family activity (complete with a fantastic weather forecast), this is one weekend activity that local residents will want to hear about.

Steps, stairwells and door-to-door sprints

With 1500 homes to reach, it was a workout in itself.

Peter had drawn us estate maps, and divided us into teams, with the corresponding number of leaflets. This was a precise plan-and-a-half.

After a brief briefing, which included the how-to’s on dealing with ‘troublesome letter boxes’ (yes, it’s a thing), off we ran to our respective blocks.

Who knew leafleting was such a workout. Steps, stairs, and a quick sprint from house to house proved to be the only way to blitz such a large area.

It was fun, it was fast and it was effective.

Until next time

We raced back to our meeting point a little after 12:30, satisfied that was an hour well spent.

Handing our remaining leaflets back to Peter, we headed back to base for a final stretch.

A rush from the office and home for Sam and Paulin, but they just made it on time for this Tabard Garden Growers task near Borough.

We were greeted by a friendly face, Peter. He had the tools (shovels and wheelbarrows) ready and the task was set. We had to fill the wheelbarrows with the excess soil and dump them in the wooden container boxes/planter that were placed outside (he managed to get them for free). These planters were lined with durable planter lining and held down with rubble. We kept on shovelling, shifting and filling until all 7 planters were filled with soil. In the end, we just needed 2 people as any more and we would have done this task in minutes!

What was the reason why we were filling these planters? They will be used as a deterrent against fly tipping in the local community as there seems to be a lot of that around the corner of this place. The planters will be used to grow thorny plants as an extra form of defense, ensuring people stay away 😂

The hour flew by as Sam and Paulin caught up with Peter after months of not seeing each other. It was good to be out on a beautiful Thursday evening. We look forward to more tasks with the Tabard Garden Growers!

Today we welcomed new GoodGym-mers Paulina, Evie, and Emma to their first ever mission!

We helped Peter and Anna from Beautiful Balin with clearing the leaves. This would have taken them a long time to do by themselves, so they really appeciated our help!

Finally, just before we left, we had managed to squeeze in some bulb planting too. Beautiful Balin had been given lots of tulip bulbs by Greener Bermondsey as part of their Ada100 initiative. The map in the photos shows where the bulbs have been planted all around south London. We look forward to seeing the tulips when they come up and are excited to find out what colours we planted!

GoodGym volunteers helped at Beautiful Balin, Balin House. We met with Peter who explained us how we make the garden more beautiful. First we scraped the grass with the spade and then we dispersed the pile of woodchip on the soil. We had a very good workout for the evening especialy for Ceiling who cycled from Tower of Hamlet. Special thanks to Liz who came for the very first time to help us tonight, she collected her first good deed. Well done Liz for doing this and very warm welcome.

This weekend we came back to finish painting the rails at Beautiful Balin. This is the last of a summer-long series of missions which started with scraping the old paint off, back in the beginning of July!

We started by doing the second and final coats of paint on the rails, working in pairs. We managed to finish this with 30 minutes to spare - just enough time to go back to the "bottoms" of the rails, which Peter showed us how to carefully and precisely paint.

It was great to step back at the end and finally see the rails completely painted, looking great and complementing the garden that it encloses!