Pitshanger Junior parkrun celebrated a huge milestone today, their 500th event! 🥳👏 To celebrate, they'd asked everyone present to wear blue and one of the organisers had even brought cake to celebrate the 11 years that the event had been running 🎂. Four of the original volunteers from that first parkrun in 2014 were present too.

Little did they know that an elite group of 11 (co-incidentally) puddle jumpers and cake box crackers was present within the 80 finishers and 38 volunteers today. By the time that Harvey and Kash had returned from their marshalling duties, there were only crumbs left of the cake that once represented the parkrun's route. Sevan was timekeeping and his evidence was pieced together with the chocolately finger prints around the crime scene to hunt down the cake robbing culprits, some of whom are still at large 🕵️.

GoodGym will be back supporting Pitshanger Junior parkrun in 2 weeks, when there may be 11 fewer runners present. They would love to have as many volunteers as today, so please sign up to help make this brilliant event happen.

Flowerbeds, that is. When team GoodGym arrived at the Feeding Ealing site today, task owner Joseph boasted that their growing area had increased by 80% in the past few months by building extra raised beds. There was still more to do and that's where the GoodGymers came in. Joseph's plan was to grow sweet potatoes next year and he explained that they need deep soil, so 4 of the existing growing beds in the polytunnel needed to have a loft extension.

Joseph provided the materials, planks, batons, saws and screwdrivers. All the team needed to do was to decide how to use them to grow the super tubers. Once they had a plan, baby, mummy and daddy mallets were added to the tool roster, long stakes were sawed and they were knocked into the corners of each bed, with hidden water pipes under the soil providing extra jeopardy 🌊.

New sides for the beds were roughly measured and cut to size, then the challenge was to make everything secure so that it would hold together through the next growing season. Screws were applied liberally, with some of the team having their first go at wielding a drill.

"Gently press the trigger and the screw should go into the baton"
"Don't worry. If you screw it up we can undo it" - Sevan
"Nice pun" - Maria
"Actually, that was completely unintentional" - Sevan

With the taller beds ready, Joseph could then fill them with a secret substance that he called his "very fertile soil". The recent - and first - growing season at the site had been successful too and Joseph was keen to share some of the produce prepared through the hard work of volunteers, like the GoodGymers. As the sun was setting, they wrapped up early and Joseph treated them to a glass of 2025 damson wine and jars of Wiri Wiri Chilli Relish and Green Tomato Chutney, which the team helped to harvest for last month. It was a tasty end to the year with Feeding Ealing and GoodGym will be back in early January to prepare the 2026 crop.

The twelfth and final month of 2025 brought a dozen GoodGymers to the Horsenden Farm volunteering day. Were we surprised by such a turnout in December? Not at all! The farm continues to attract crowds of GoodGymers from Ealing and other areas. Today’s visitors were: the regular guest from Hounslow, Maxime, and a former Ealing team member, now based in Tower Hamlets, Maria. It was great to see both of them!

The task was not only an occasion for returns, but also for new beginnings. We welcomed Raji, who already knew Horsenden’s pizza and craft beer secrets, but was keen to get stuck into various volunteering opportunities, and farm work sounded pretty exciting.

Steph Ducat, Iram and Victoria were the lucky (or shall I say mucky?) ones to get the quintessential farm experience, with its animalistic element. They got to play with Nala the dog and with cow poo. Transporting barrows and barrows of manure out of the barn, they clocked in plenty of steps and built an impressive pile of... you know what!

Meanwhile, the less dirty of the dozen played explorers in an overgrown part of Horsenden Hill. Their mission: locate a ditch, clear the ditch, build a dead hedge. Simple, right? With such a big team - yes! On the forefront, several brave ones: Ash, Freya and Raji, led the expedition, and raced each other to get to the ditch. The first timer, Raji, impressed everyone by being the first one to reach the trench. Maxime and Kash widened the paths made by the pioneers, and Afshin vigorously raked the cuttings to gather material for the dead hedge.

The ditch turned out to be longer than expected, so Penny and Sevan launched two more expeditions to attack the ditch from the other side. Both reached the destination and joined forces with those already in the trenches. Result? All unwanted vegetation has been removed from the ditch and used for constructing the dead hedge. Clearing the space will help improve the drainage at one of the trails at Horsenden Hill - when we worked on that path on a very rainy day in the past, it looked like a river!

We finished the session, traditionally, with the wood-fired pizza, and were proud to support Horsenden Loaf, which otherwise didn’t get many customers in the morning. We hoped the sales would pick up in the afternoon, and now hope that the pizza oven will be on in January. Horsenden will be one of the first sessions in 2026, so if we want to include more GoodGymming in your New Year’s resolutions, sign up now!

The GPRA Hall, which, a month ago, hosted a sustainable Baby & Kids tabletop sale (prepped with GoodGym's involvement), was ready for another makeover on Friday evening. The occasion was the Residents' Christmas Party the following day, and the hall needed a proper dose of sparkles, baubles, lights and balloons.

When Maria and Steph Ducat arrived early, they were immediately put to work at height by one of the organisers, who spotted the potential of the tall and fit duo to do the challenging job of decorating strings hanging from the ceiling. And she was right! By taking turns on climbing and holding the step ladder, Maria and Steph showed no fear and plenty of creative flair, putting up balloons and baubles up high.

Meanwhile, Sevan and Kash arrived at a perfect time to decorate the Christmas tree. The seemingly easy job of putting lights on the tree turned out to be a story with a twist! Two GoodGymers were spinning the tree clockwise to speed up the process until they came across a significant tangle in the wire and nearly relived their mission of disarming Ms H's fairy lights system. Just when they were close to untangling the knot, Sevan noticed that the cable had been torn and no longer connected to the plug! In a fortunate turn of events, one of the GPRA volunteers happened to be an electrician, who, after fetching the right tools for the job, safely fixed the problem.

With the energy supply problem solved, baubles hung on the Christmas tree and balloons on the ceiling, the GPRA Hall turned into a truly festive venue! The next stop of the GoodGym Ealing journey through the festive season is our annual church decoration at St Mary's, this time with the new vicar. Don't miss it and sign up for the 9th December evening task!

Despite the December chill, Julian led a determined crew of runners to yesterday’s GoodGym Greenwich task. Khai, Ceci and Kerry joined him on the run, while the rest of the team met us at the Brooklands School. We were especially pleased to welcome back Sevan, making a triumphant return after a work Christmas do, and Aman, who left Bristol early just to make it in time. That’s the kind of commitment that keeps GoodGym glowing - heroes, all of you!

Our mission for the evening was to paint the staff room and finish cleaning the cupboards. And true to the evening’s punny title (No Whisk, No Reward) we kicked things off by seeing what on earth we could use to stir the paint... it actually wasn't a whisk but we couldn't resist Khai's excellent pun anyway. With slightly fewer rollers and brushes than ideal (and absolutely no spare whisks), we embraced classic GoodGym ingenuity and made do with what we had. Before long, the first coat was on the walls and the cupboards were sparkling.

We didn’t quite manage to get around the whole room this time, but fear not, we’ll be back in January to finish the job!

Looking ahead, there’s plenty more GoodGym goodness on the horizon: 👉 This Saturday: Talk and Tidy and Westcombe Woodlands 👉 Next Wednesday: get ready to flex those painting muscles again for an indoor task at Arthur’s school!

Brilliant work everyone🛠️🎨💪🏽❤️

Until next time,

Rachel

Rain did not stop play for a trio of Ealing GoodGymers, who showed up at Ealing Broadway on the first Tuesday evening of December for a very short run to Walpole Park and a classic winter task: woodchipping.

Steph Ducat, Sevan and Kash made their way to the Walled Garden, where they excavated the old woodchip covering one of the paths between veg beds. They used the material as mulch and spread it on a large flower bed nearby. Clever! It wasn't their idea, to be fair, but the ranger's orders.

A couple of shovelling trips with a trolley and wheelbarrows to the other end of the park brought enough fresh woodchip to fill the whole path - that's quite a result for only three GoodGymers! In 2023, it took almost 4 times as many people to do that! What has changed? Well, primarily the location of the woodchip!

What has not changed was the wisdom of the philosopher:

Be woodchip, my friend. Empty your barrow. Be formless, shapeless, like woodchip. You put woodchip on a path, it becomes the path. You put woodchip into a barrow, it becomes the barrow. You put it in compost, it becomes the compost. Now, woodchip can nourish, or it can kill (weeds). Be wood chip, my friend.

We will be back soon to Walpole Park for more woodchip wisdom and making sure we finished the other path!