It was a mild evening in Ealing last night, perfect for a run and spot of gardening at DIG for Cultivate London.

We started with a group introduction welcoming two new runners into the fold with Sinead and Charlotte joining us for their first GoodGym run. Big welcome, you both did a great job!

50 TODAY!

We also had another reason to celebrate tonight with Michael C completing his 50th good deed and earning his black ninja t-shirt! Over the past year Michael has been a regular in Ealing as well as visiting a few other areas and starting his mission running. He always volunteers to back mark as part of the taskforce and is also great a encouraging people to come to parkrun outside of of Tuesday session. We're very happy to have him as part of the Ealing crew and look forward to having him on the next 50 tasks to get his t-shirt with wings!

After a quick sweep on favourite ice-cream flavours (chocolate and banana got a few mentions) we were off and started with a little warm up jog down to the park before working in file formation on some sprint work. Last week we did a test run of this but went a little too fast, this week I think we nailed it!

We arrived at the site and were met by Rosie who had a large pitch for us to de-weed and turn over to get ready for a whole new crop to be planted in. She also had some planting for us to complete in another section of the garden so lots for everyone to get stuck into!

diggity, some doubt...

After initial confusion of 'surely this isn't all weeds, we can't be taking it all out?!' it was confirmed it was and we had permission to go to town on the plot and everyone grabbed a fork and started digging away! Everyone said what a hard workout the job was which is an added bonus on these types of tasks but I think one of the hardest things about last night was getting the full wheelbarrows on weeds into the compost heap, the slope proved tricky to maneuver and required a few of us get it up an over!

I don't think any of us wanted to leave but after half an hour of tough digging it was time time to call it a night, but don't worry it won't go unfinished as we'll back back next week to pick up were we left off!