This week we were back at St John Church Hall for the first time this year. We met up just at the entrance where we were given our various tasks by Stephen.

Kirk and Russell D were first tasked with breaking down some rather large fallen branches to get them in to one of the brown bins which took no time at all.

Rachel and Caroline joined Stephen with repainting the kitchen, something which we originally did about two years ago, but it needed a bit of a fresh coat after some new cupboards were recently installed.

Russell D put his body on the line to destroy the brambles behind the hall and pull them out from the roots. Taking a few scrapes to his bare legs, he looked like he’d just done a round of the Barkley Marathons. Toby raked the fallen brambles into the clearing, where Joel, Lucy and Kirk broke them down and put them in the brown bin. There was talk of climbing in the bin to compact all the plant matter, which was doing my anxiety no favours!! Thankfully though, Kirk used this as an opportunity to release some stress and knocked it all down with his rake instead, whew.

Thanking Joel for the pun, it really was a great effort by everyone and we finished the jobs in no time at all. Showing yet more of that wonderful GoodGym spirit, Toby and Kirk even took the brown bins back to the church as we said our goodbyes. Thanks for coming everyone, see you all again soon!!

The 23rd June was meant to be our first Group Run for well over a year. But as ‘freedom day’ was delayed so was the return of our beloved Group Runs. Thankfully the task we had set up could still go ahead as a Community Mission instead. And so for the first time since the pandemic began we returned to Interact, the place where GoodGym Chelmsford started almost 5 years ago.

We met up with Susie who gave us a low down on what Interact does and some of the programmes they are running at the moment. Susie also bought along her lovely dog Winnie to say hi to the group. She wasn’t a distraction at all! 😍

Our task was to clear the garden paths of any weeds that had been growing. We got some gloves, hand trowels and forks and made sure we spread out to get to work. Anna and Lucy focussed on the path around the back while the rest of us paid attention to the front, Toby made very impressive progress on his patch. We managed to clear quite a large amount of the paths in the time we had. Emptying our buckets into the compost bin it was over all too soon. Before saying our goodbyes we had a few refreshments (well it would have been rude not to) and went on our separate ways home.

It was lovely to finally be back at Interact and doing some work in the gorgeous Aspire Garden, hopefully it won’t be so long before our next visit!!

It was another scorching day, but that and the disappointment of the return of our much loved Group Runs being delayed, didn’t put off three runners, two walkers and three cyclists meeting up at the Sanctus allotment to finish clearing it of weeds.

Kirk bought along his allotment guide book so we can have a bit of a plan moving forwards. It’ll certainly make some good bedtime reading for me.

We got quite a lot done in our hour at the site. Rachel, Joel, Kirk and Russell D cleared the last remaining patch that we hadn’t previously got to. Toby got rid of the weeds that were trying to get a stranglehold in the bits we’d already cleared and Leanne and Anna got rid of the weeds in the Raspberry and (what we now know to be) White Currant beds. As it hasn’t rained much recently Joel and Rachel made sure they had a thorough watering as well. To finish off Kirk, Toby, Leanne and Anna followed on from what David started last week and planning out where we should put some beds for planting, marking them out.

The allotment looks so different to where it was a few weeks ago and really has undergone a dramatic transformation in quite a short space of time. Well done for all your hard work everyone.

Next week, we’ll be going to the Interact Garden on Wednesday to do some de-weeding and back to the Sanctus allotment on Thursday just to give it a quick bit of maintenance and to stop any weeds from coming back.

See you all again at another task soon!!