This was our first time at Holy Trinity Lamorbey Church where the parish administrator, Pat, and parishioners Annie and Rosie (with her children), gave us a warm welcome and explained the task: clear a tangle of brambles and weeds from a flowerbed, and pull up the underlying plastic membrane, if possible.

With the church summer fayre taking place in just a few days, the pressure was on to make things look neater and tidier!

We were a hive of activity as we jumped to it: cutting back the growth, digging out roots, heaving up the membrane, and barrowing the cuttings to a compost area.

We downed tools at one point to rescue a toad and carefully move it to a new home in nearby bushes 🐸.

We think we also disturbed a bumble bee nest as there were lots of them buzzing around our legs. Simon got stung through his socks twice, ouch! 🐝🐝🐝

Several passers by stopped to comment on our work - the red GG tshirts certainly make us stand out!

And what a difference between before and after! We cleared the whole area and we could hardly bee-lieve how much we got done in just an hour.

We'll bee back again across the summer to help with more tasks in the garden. Hop along and join us.

This morning 10 of us gathered, with four mini litter pickers in tow, to join the Friends of Woolwich Common for their monthly litter pick. Such is the GoodGym community that several of us bumped into each other in Charlton Park - on that note, special welcome back to Ibrahim on your third task in a week! Seems like someone's got the GoodGym bug!

After gathering all the necessary equipment, we all headed off to different parts of the common, filling lots of bags of rubbish and a couple of dumped chairs and lots of chats along the way. Thanks to Robyn for sharing her snacks at the end! And to Ashton for pumping up my running buggy tyres. No excuse now!

On Wednesday we're back at Brooklands School for more soil shifting.

Until next time 😊

Rachel

A few weeks ago i made a meet up date to litter pick the woods in barnhurst we made 6 bags of litter

This morning Ashton joined the Friends of the Cray at Crayford on their mission to remove pesky Himalayan balsam plants along the river.

Why get rid of it? The plant erodes river banks and pushes out native species so it's a rather hostile invader!

Himalayan balsam spreads like fury by spraying out thousands of seeds from its flowers. So every year the race is on to pull up stems before they develop flowers!

This means scouring the banks from the water and from the land. The transparent stems are quite distinctive and with care they pull up easily with their roots attached, so it's a battle that's gradually being won year on year!

Had it was a lovely sunny in the afternoon i definitely said to myself i am going litter picking and did from my road to the bottom of park Crescent and then Victoria roaf then frazer road # good gym Bexley