Sevan and Kash expected delays (but maybe not severe delays!) on their second task of the day: a cabinet building. But time flies when you are having fun - or assembling flatpack furniture! They called Ms E, their last beneficiary, to admit they were running late. Fortunately, the lady was not going anywhere and was happy to wait for the GoodGymers. Phew!

Ms E needed some unwanted vegetation removed from the back of her garden: alkanet, Herb Robert, cleaver (a.k.a. sticky willy), some grass, and a few weeds that were taller than Sevan! The only things to keep were two apple trees and two lavender plants.

The pair made up for the slippage with the quality of their work. The weeds faced a true armageddon, being wiped out from the surface of the garden and from the back wall. Just look at the photo of that madman with a butcher's cleaver - the weeds had nowhere to hide from him! Sadly, some snails were lost due to the intensity of weed extermination, but that's the nature of life... and GoodGyming.

Ms E was impressed with the result and offered the duo water, soft drinks and sweet treats. She even wanted to reward Sevan and Kash with cash, but the GoodGymers explained they were volunteers and did gardening exclusively for fun.

You should do private jobs too! - Ms E said.

That's one more benefit of GoodGym: you may not notice it from the start, but you keep learning new skills on the job. How else would the author of this report know what alkanet, Herb Robert and cleaver are, if not from GoodGyming experience? Sevan and Kash will keep building their horticultural portfolio until they're fed up with their desk jobs, then take over the world of gardening one day.

Revisiting Ms S' casa after almost a year, there was a big difference. She decided to make more use of her garden and live an alfresco lifestyle, moving a lot of her furniture and belongings into the sun trap linked to her basement apartment.

Today, her giardino and apartment felt like the Amalfi coast, maybe helped by the Roman style column that Ms S was painting outside. Back inside there was marble flooring visible too.

"I can see the floor now [in the living room]" - Sevan

Being able to see the floor was a change to last time and also important for the mission as Ms S wanted Kash and Sevan to build a tall cabinet. Putting big things on the ground was essential to them building something for Ms S to put her tableware in for entertaining.

The cabinet had been ordered from Temu and this was the first time that Kash or Sevan were building flat pack furniture from there. Sevan had very low expectations for the quality of instructions or materials, but one of them turned out to be surprisingly good.

As the GoodGymers unpacked the 2 large boxes, Ms S offered refreshments. She remembered the tea (chocolate & vanilla rooibos) that the pair had enjoyed last year. Today was too hot though, so some water would be fine, even if it wasn't ice cold. Then, Ms S had an even better idea. She had a bottle of prosecco, nicely cooled in her fridge. Kash thought it wouldn't improve their furniture building abilities, plus they had a 6km run to their next mission on empty stomachs, so they stuck with water. Not to be deterred in getting Sevan into an Italian vibe, a Cornetto appeared, which he couldn't say no to 🍦.

The furniture building was slow and mostly uneventful. The instructions were actually very good, even if the build quality was only so-so. Mostly uneventful meant that there was an "event" and that happened when Kash and Sevan triumphantly pushed the completed top and bottom pieces together and started pinning the back panels in place. A gap appeared above one of the panels and they realised that the 2 main parts weren't actually screwed together 😯. After a quick rifle through the instructions, a fix was made and the cabinet was done... and properly assembled.

Ms S was extremely happy and explained to the pair what would be moved out of bags and boxes into the new storage space. Another step towards her turning her apartment into a liveable home.

Mrs H had a beautiful new patio. Her builders weren't gardeners though and had made a mess of her flower beds. They'd left big gaps between the new wall around the flower beds and the soil inside it and someone needed to fill them in. Mrs H's small palm tree had been knocked over too and was now being propped up or weighed down by some pieces of rubble. Not ideal and nor was the fact that Mrs H's favourite fork had vanished.

As well as the main tasks above, there was some general weeding and tidying to do, which Kash took on, plus removing a dead rosemary bush. Mrs H was also concerned about any trees growing in her garden and wanted to dig them out. Sevan thought that would be quite destructive as it would affect a lot of nearby plants, so instead the pair cut the trunks of any potential trees at ground level, stunting their growth for now. All the while, everyone kept their eyes peeled for the missing fork

With the ground work completed, it was time to fill in the missing soil and make the palm tree more stable. Mrs H's son had had 6 bags (or 360 litres) of compost delivered, so Kash and Sevan got to work, moving the bags and pouring the compost, finishing just in time for the end of the mission. The end result was, no gaps 🙌 and no fork 😢. Despite not finding the fork, it was a great way to start the day, leaving Kash and Sevan filling positive for the missions to come...

"Woe is me tablet" said Mr G when Kash and Sevan arrived at his flat, which made an interesting change from "woe is me". It was Kash and Sevan's Missionversary - 3 years since their first mission together 🕯️🕯️🕯️ - and what better way to spend it than with an exasperated Mr G, who was fed up with his digital devices. The devices all had minds of their own, or so Mr G thought. Nothing was working as he expected and most importantly, he had some high priority emails that he'd been unable to send from his tablet.

The failed emails had Kash and Sevan scratching their heads as they all had attachments and all of the attached files were no longer on the tablet... mysterious. New emails were being sent just fine though, but they discovered a different problem with Mr G's second (secret agent?) email account. The account worked fine on Mr G's second, identical tablet though. Eventually Sevan solved it with the classic log-out-then-log-back in solution.

With his tablet able to send emails correctly, Kash took a look at Mr G's laptop as he said that he was also unable to access his Gmail account there. It looked to be working fine though. The GoodGymers still had 30 minutes left, so tried to solve any other problems that Mr G was having. They learned that Canon support were on Mr G's speed dial as he was having regular problems printing from his phone and tablets. Sevan had solved problems with this particular printer once before. Again, everything seemed to be working OK, so they couldn't understand why Mr G was having problems at other times 🤷‍♂️🤷‍♀️.

With all of the current problems seemingly solved, it was time to say au revoir to Mr G. Sevan wasn't sure when he'd be back. For Kash, she'll revoir tomorrow, for Mr G's regular shopping mission.

On a cloudy, yet no longer rainy Tuesday evening, Sevan took Ealing GoodGymers for a run through Walpole Park to Lammas Enclosure. Surprisingly, we went past the Transition Orchard, not stopping there this time, then past the tennis courts. Did our run leader miss the task location? Today we met Trevor from Ealing Transition at a new woodchip pile. He challenged us to fill our wheelbarrows first before he would take us to the area in need of GoodGym hands.

"You are filling these wheelbarrows six times faster than I would!" - Trevor.

Trevor showed us a patch of tiny trees planted last year. During the late spring, the snips were having a tough time, bullied by the brambles that grew much quicker. Trevor had already started rescuing the saplings to prevent the bullies from completely taking over, and we could see piles of thorny cuttings around. Our job was to free all the remaining tiny trees and cover the ground with woodchip to suppress further growth of weeds.

At first, the whole team focused on taking down the brambles, with A.B. and Freya at the forefront. Gradually, the chopping team started losing its members to the woodchipping job: first Steph Ducat, then Harvey, and finally Kash. Sevan stayed in the small forest area to rake and coordinate the woodchip operations.

As the cuttings heap grew, the woodchip pile shrunk, eventually running out completely. Just 45 minutes of GoodGymming transformed a sad, overgrown thicket into a little forest of happy saplings, thriving surrounded by a thick layer of mulch.

"On behalf of the trees - thank you!" - Trevor.

We are keeping our fingers crossed for the trees that had been now set for a fresh start in their long life - but we will be back to check in on them later in the summer and fight back the thorny bullies if needed!

Next week we have a totally different type of task: we'll be teaming up with Ealing Repair Café again to reduce fabric waste and create goods for the community! Sign up now. It's an indoor task, so the weather is not an excuse 😉