Compost Piles and the Rubble Strugglers

Photos by Harriet Cawley, Rebecca Harris writes:Another Monday, and another group of exceedingly-energetic GoodGymers met at Bethnal Green’s the Arch Gallery to receive their orders for the evening.Task One was a pleasant-sounding meander through lower-Tower Hamlets to Stepney City Farm, to help them move some farm-like objects into their new buildings – 5km in total.Task Two was a more gruelling 8km run to Patchwork Farm in Hackney, where social enterprise group Growing Communities is creating a new plot. They needed a tonne of fresh manure shovelled and wheelbarrowed into some raised beds, which will soon be used to grow salad.Faced with limited tools and looming storm clouds, hopes were not high that the Task Two Team would be finished in time. But, the GoodGymers are equal-parts brain and brawn and some ingenious solutions were put to the test, like ramps made of old wooden-planks for faster ‘wheelbarrow-dump’ time, and some impressive ‘super-speed-sweeping’.Job completed, the GoodGymers took one cautious look at the clouds, and headed back to Arch Gallery at top pace, reaching there just as the first droplets were falling – another success.Photos below by Richard Foster, Ivo & MarkLauren Garland writes:Seventeen of us took off from the Arch gallery this evening for a 5k run down to Stepney City Farm. Winding through the empty back streets of Bethnal Green the cheers of encouragement from the locals helped us maintain a good pace despite the humidity of the evening. We assumed they were meant in encouragement anyway.We arrived at the farm to find out what jobs had been set aside for us. There were rumours of heavy lifting that were making some of us a little nervous. It turns out that the farm has just had some new barns built, so all the jobs involved moving things to new homes in or around the new barn.Job number one was moving rubble from one corner of the farm to a skip in the main yard. Lots of GoodGymers had moved the rubble over to the corner a few months ago and were a little gutted  that they now had to face moving it all back again! But despite their reservations lifting their own bodyweight in rubble turned out to be a fantastic workout, though I'd put money on there being a fair few aches and pains this morning!The second job was a little less pleasant. The task was to move all of the bagged up cow poo to a new pile by the barn. A couple of our braver ladies stepped up, loading up a cart with bags and tubs & pushing the load across the yard. There was only one near mishap when a pile of the bags nearly tumbled off the cart but it seemed like everyone escaped poo-free.The last two jobs were straight forward moving jobs, the first to move a huge pile of palettes to a new home by the barn door & the second to empty a shed of it's contents. The palette shifting was heavy work and they had a lot to get through and while shed emptying was the lightest of lifting jobs there was a lot of ground to cover between the two barns.After a good half an hours work the skip had filled up dramatically, the poo had been relocated, the original palette pile was a shadow of it's former self and the shed was empty and awaiting a new occupant, so we set off home.We headed back the way we came through through the darkening streets and the cooling drizzle, complaining about it getting dark so much earlier than last week.As we reached the park at Bethnal Green Ivo suggested a sprint to celebrate the end of the Olympics, personally I prefer to celebrate things with beer, but sadly that wasn't an option. So we all ran like mad things through the park trying to reach our maximum speed and fit a little anaerobic exercise into our workout, and then walked rather slowly across the zebra crossing to compensate.