For GoodGym Ealing's second compost task of they week, they became purveyors of fine compost, free to a good home, allotment or dog peeing spot. Anyone could turn up with a container and take away as much as they'd like. Opening the tool storage, the 6 GoodGymers present were surprised to find 2 barrows prefilled with compost as well as the shovels and wheelbarrows essential for the task.

The barrows turned into another job for the team as Steph, Max and Jo went to fill the second bay in the Walled Garden, continuing the work from Tuesday's group run. Today was Jo's first session with GoodGym and she did an amazing job, shovelling compost like a pro with the others 💪 🥳 👏!

Back at the giant compost heap, the team again tried to guess that was in the compost based on it's pungent smell. Definitely not food waste according to Kymm and probably something leafy. Familiar faces appeared as Claire and Madhan took away a couple of wheelbarrows which the team filled up for them. Let's see what they grow with it at their Northfield allotments plots. Others came too with bin bags, shopping trolleys and one woman had come all the way from West Acton with a folding cart (and a car).

"I'd like some black gold please" - Woman with cart "Well, we have around 2 tons of it. How much would you like?" - Sevan "Oh, I'll take a ton" - Woman with cart

She had 10 bins bags, which didn't quite come to a metric ton. Still, she was really grateful for what she was able to wheel away to use in her garden. The team wrapped up at 12:30 having done a good shovelling shift, leaving the remaining heap to gardeners who'd brought their own spades and excited dogs, who'd find a new favourite digging spot.

When the clocks go back in October, who would say no to that extra hour in bed on Sunday morning?

GoodGymers!

Five of them have beaten the autumn-winter sloth and showed up bright and early in Northfields to help Kathy and her colleagues from Ealing Transition Beeshare tame the rampant ivy and brambles in the Walmer Gardens orchard.

I can honestly say that GoodGym is threatening to disrupt my normal weekend lie-in habits - Max.

Turning into an early bird wasn't the only risk at this morning's session. As the orchard served as the location for the bee co-op's hives, we couldn't be 100% sure that no one would get stung. Kathy showed us a dividing point (an old apple tree) beyond which there was no guarantee that the bees would accept our operations. At the end of the session, it turned out that the pollinators must have been pleased with our presence or hadn't got their coffee shot yet (despite Steph inadvertently leaving his cup around them). No bee stings reported!

The Beeshare team had been working on clearing the space of brambles earlier on and had left some old cuttings, which Max offered to collect and drop at the back of the orchard. Deepak and Sevan volunteered to free the fruit trees at the garden entrance from ivy and brambles. Steph Ducat and Kash chose to cut the blackberry shoots around the big apple tree marking the border of the hive territory. In the process, they stomped on numerous uncollected fallen apples - squish, squish! - and, luckily, didn't stomp on two frogs - ribbit, ribbit! - hiding in the brambles. Steph, to keep the amphibians safe, moved them closer to the pond. At least that's what he told Kash. Should she have trusted the French guy to deal with frogs?

Ninety minutes of productive lopping, pulling and wheelbarrowing left the orchard transformed and ready for the winter break. Four GoodGymers decided it wasn't enough goodgymming for the day and jogged to Walpole Park for their second task that morning.

After two community missions in their borough, Ealing GoodGymers Sevan and Kash headed to Camden to help Ms N with packing her belongings ahead of a house move. Ms N suffered from fibromyalgia, a health condition characterised by chronic pain and fatigue, which prevents patients from completing tasks requiring physical and mental effort.

The GoodGymers assembled several cardboard boxes and stuffed them with books and CDs from Ms N's cabinet. That way, they filled about 80% of the cartons in 20% of the time. Then it was time to pack away items classed as ornaments: candle holders, artificial eggs, art supplies and general bric-à-brac. That part was rather slow-going, as the things had to be secured first. That's where the stacks of Metro newspapers Ms N had been keeping in the passageway came in handy.

While clearing two cabinets that Ms N had turned into a large table with drawers, Sevan and Kash uncovered some old-school objects that took them to the previous millennium! PC magazines from the 1990s and CDs with software compatible with Windows 2000 were unlikely to run on any modern laptop, so the throwback content ended up in the throw-away bag.

Sevan and Kash have filled six boxes with Ms N's belongings and one bin bag with items she could part with. It was the first step to help her on her journey to move home. There are more ornaments and challenges on the way to the new flat, so maybe another pair of GoodGymers will visit soon to lend Mr N a hand.

There were 6 people working away at Care4Calais today, which made the space very busy. Especially the stock room. They were split into 2 teams, with Maria working with Tamzin and another C4C volunteer to bag requests for beneficiaries while Kash, Anita and Sevan sorted the new batch of donations that had magically appeared since last week.

The pack builders were running low on certain men's sizes and shoes, meaning that Maria came hunting for freshly sorted clothes to complete her packs. The sorting started with lots of children's clothes though, then men's (mostly XXL), then women's, also mostly XXL. Some of them still had their tags on, so had never been worn!

With Kash and Sevan heading to a mission in north London, all the clothes were stuffed into boxes in the stock room before they ran off. There were so many 2XL clothes that Tamzin may need to build another room to house them! No doubt there'll be more supernatural clothing multiplication between now and GoodGym's next visit in November, meaning there'll be plenty more for the team to work through.

In October 1985, Marty McFly jumped into Doc Brown's DeLorean and travelled 40 years into the future. He jumped not only in time, but in space too. Marty found himself in 2025 London, although it didn't look like London at all. Grassy meadows, pine trees, blue skies, uninterrupted by unsightly skyscrapers. But there was something else...

Instead of flying hoverboards, so ubiquitous in 2015, the meadow was full of fly-tipped boards - parts of beds, drawers, cupboards. If Marty went back to 2023, he'd have seen that volunteers from Friends of Grove Farm, LAGER Can, and GoodGym have cleared the fly-tipped bulky rubbish from the Ealing Northern meadow. Now the flytips were back!

GoodGymers Max, Sevan and Kash joined a group of Friends of Grove Farm for the usual monthly conservation day, but the need to keep the place clear of rubbish was more pressing. Mike, the lead of Friends of Grove Farm, gave the team a choice of two projects: picking up small litter or removing bulky trash: pieces of furniture, pipes, buckets, barbecues, mowers. The team decided to tackle the large-scale rubbish and cleared two big patches of flytips.

After the initial shock, Marty McFly was so inspired that he travelled in time to the next Grove Farm conservation day in November 2025. There is still time to sign up for those who don't have a DeLorean time machine. We are hoping to see you and Marty there!

The usual Friday night short run to South Acton and food shopping for Mr G at Sainsbury's in Chiswick.