It was great to be welcomed back to Aldermoor this evening by Richard exactly a year on from the very first time we visited this wonderful community place. It was officially one year since a group of enthusiastic Southamptoners came together to find out how they could be involved with the first new area to launch since covid and the first community led area too. That night we shifted compost but this evening we were painting signs, cleaning bricks, feeding the cats, and saying goodnight to all the farm birds. We finished off with some unofficial birthday biscuits to celebrate our unofficial birthday (check out our session on 22nd April for our official celebrations!). Richard always keeps us busy and on our toes with new skills to learn so we are very grateful to him for his hard work and organisation. We look forward to our next session at the farm when we won't even need head torches!

After a good spring clean more than 20 items of clothing and a pair of shoes were collected and donated to Miss Dolittle's, a charity shop that raises money for local animal rescues. We hope our donations enjoy their new homes!

We split into two teams this evening to maximise our leaflet delivery potential. We welcomed newbie Claire to Team 1 with Wilson and Leszek. They headed off to complete streets on the right hand side to start with while Team 2, Janet and myself, headed to the left. Janet suggested we head to the pub while waiting for Team 1 to return from squirrelling away leaflets on Squirrel Drive, but they caught us up too quick! Reunited we completed the final street together. It was quite small and with many hands we think we achieved a record time to leaflet a street in about 2 minutes! So many streets, so little time so we hope to return again this month to complete the job. Great work everyone.

Our task this evening was to clean bricks! It was fun from the start with Richard demonstrating how clean we needed to clean the bricks, (I'm sure he had picked an easy one!) Some important things to note were how to clean the "P" on a brick and how to decide if a dink was just a dink!

Ellie and Hannah got to work by collecting the bricks from the big pile and wheelbarrowing them up to the two cleaning stations

Judy, Val, Sarah, Amanda and Wilson were armed with tools at their cleaning tables, ready to scrape and remove mortar and paint from the bricks. (Not as easy as Richard made it look)

We welcomed a new volunteer Leszek to the task this evening, after helping with a task on Sunday it was great to see him join us for our Monday session. Together with Janet and Helen he helped in the shop to dismantle parts of the counter and treat some of the wooden worktop.

Once the work in the shop was complete the whole team got stuck into brick cleaning.

The time whizzed by and the hour passed quickly. We managed to clean 58 bricks!

Once cleaned up, used bricks have a monetary value of 60p each, the farm will sell the bricks to a local reclamation company.

We dink we only made a slight dink in the pile of bricks so we will be back soon for a Saturday session to do some more!

Well done to everyone who added some extra weight to their runs, walks and cycles this evening with all the food bank donations. It was a great finish to our January challenge and so nice to see so many of you at the pub for our first social of 2024.