GoodGym Nottingham felt all a bit Stone Age this week!

We were back at Walter Halls School with Adele, this time tasked with helping make over a patch of ground that will soon become a garden for the children to tend to.

Peter took a pickaxe to the patch marked out to become a pond. The ground there is pretty tough at the moment and Adele wants to have the kids help dig it out, so he was breaking it up and turning it over for them to make things a little easier.

Dayna, Vytautas and Rosemarie were digging holes to plant some of Adele's ferns and climbers – much tougher than it sounds with the hard soil, roots and rocks hindering progress.

Leah and Rachel were back shifting soil from a tonne-bag up on the hill down to the new garden space, and created a no-dig flowerbed with newcomer Marta getting the honours of sprinkling over the new wildflower seeds for her ingenious use of a big log as a hammer to get the little border fence into the ground.

We're back in a couple of weeks, hope you can join us!

We enjoyed another great turnout last night at Walter Halls School, welcoming back Diana and Theodor for their second tasks, and Rowan for her first! Also major kudos to Tom and Peter for running up from Market Square.

We were on a tight deadline as the school's site manager had to lock up by 7:30, so we got stuck straight in. The free shop's stock of donated clothing was getting a little out of hand, so we were tasked with sorting it by size and bagging up anything stained or unsuitable ready to send for recycling.

The storage room was pretty small and two other volunteers and the deputy head were sorting more stuff in there, so we filled some boxes and bags and took over the adjoining room. Some of our favourite finds were the world's biggest pair of shorts, a toy cat, some doll's clothes (which contrasted pretty well with the shorts tbh), and a t-shirt with a print of another place we've helped, Green's Windmill!

Finally, we went to toss the discarded donations into the clothes donation bin on the school site, which was harder than it sounds in the dark! Despite a few pieces being determined to escape and jump back down on us, we got most of it in before we reached the brim and took the remainder back in so it didn't get soaked in the inevitable rain.

Thanks to everyone for attending!

Sadly, Adele had to cancel our planned session due to a family illness. However, she did have a little something for us to do instead.

Peter, Nigel and Leah met up at the school with a bunch of leaflets to deliver. But it wasn't your standard drop-one-in-every-door-just-watch-out-for-snakes leafleting task.

Adele is looking for people who are having a bit of a home clear-out to donate some of their unwanted stuff for her to turn into playthings for the kids at the school - what a fab idea! (See the copy of the leaflet attached if you've got anything of your own) This meant we were looking for houses with For Sale or Sold signs.

We didn't find a huge number, but Nigel did have a chat with one person who was at their door when he dropped the leaflet and found out that the next-door neighbour had recently moved in, so we dropped one through their door too.

We just had time to pose with one of the scary children bollards before heading home for a well-earned warm-up!

A small but hardy crew of GoodGymers headed over to meet Adele up at Walter Halls School, a place we previously went to back in May to dig a big hole and roll giant cable reels down a hill (yes, really.

This time, Adele had ordered in some giant sacks of compost for the school allotment area, but the company refused to deliver them any closer to where they needed to be because of the poor weather.

So Rachel, Tom and Leah rolled up their sleeves, grabbed some spades and wheelbarrows and set about carting as much as we could across the school's expansive field and down into the allotment.

We quickly managed to fill a flowerbed and a half that Adele and her younger daughter had cleared of weeds, then started on making a big pile for the kids to get stuck into distributing around the garden.

Adele's older daughter became an honorary GoodGym member, helping us with the soil while keeping us hugely entertained with a wealth of riddles and insightful questions, and getting us our cardio in by turning each round into a literal wheelbarrow race.

We'll try to organise another task here soon, there's always plenty to do!

What a fantastic morning!

We were part of a huge team helping to transform the school's massive play areas and open spaces.

Our contact Adele had one particular task in mind for us - moving some massive cable reels downhill to create a new playspace in a wooded area. Tom, Robert and our brand new member Andrew took care of the rolling while Rachel and Leah made sure the littlest GoodGymers were occupied and out of the way while tidying the remaining materials.

Next, we took some rubbish down to the bins (including tents!) and joined in with digging the sandpit, moving some very heavy metal picnic benches across the field, and shifting tyres and wheelbarrows full of the excavated soil up to yet another play area.

Definitely a firm favourite task for us all!