Emily, Lici, Lucy, Kenny and I joined a motley crew of Russell Square Gardens volunteers on this sunny Saturday morning. Our aim? Plant 10,000 bulbs, to create a lovely bank of daffodils come spring. Our tools? Hole-punching spades that looked a lot like pogo sticks! Alongisde that, some key instructions: plant about 25 bulbs per square metre of grass in the carefully marked out areas, putting each bulb in a hole twice its depth. Plus, we were promised a free lunch from the hotel nextdoor if we stuck around long enough! We paired up and set to making some holes.

While I wouldn't normally like to complain about a September spell of hot, dry weather, it meant that the ground was extremely hard - seemingly impossible in most places to make a hole in the ground deep enough to plant even the babiest of the bulbs! Determined to find a way, some of our team set about filling and carrying watering cans over to dampen the soil and hopefully make it easier to dig. We had some limited success, but the ground was still very hard and compact - it seemed like the water would need some time to sink in.

Just when our spirits were dipping a little, a very sweet doggo came over to sniff around where we were digging, with its fashionable-looking owner in tow looking like Gok Wan. OH WAIT, it actually was Gok Wan! Gok gave us no fashion advice, but made charming small talk about our gardening efforts and thanked us for our hard work. This is what happens when you do missions in fancy Bloomsbury, folks, I'm telling you!

I had to leave before lunch, but handed over my bulb-planting implement to a curious passerby who had wandered over off the street and asked to join us ("I saw them doing this on Gardeners' World last night!"). Meanwhile, the group organisers were discussing a possible new gameplan to try planting again the next weekend, having watered the soil the night before to soften it. I hope the lunch was tasty and the bulb-planting team have better luck this weekend!