Good to Grow Day 2021

Good to Grow Day (the new name for the Big Dig) is now a weekend of action from Friday 23 to Monday 26 April for edible gardens to celebrate and prepare for the new growing season, promote their activities and encourage people to volunteer.

Good to Grow 2021

Join the national day of edible action!

Good to Grow Days 23-26th April 2021

The Good to Grow day event is a weekend of celebration for community gardens and growing networks to kick off the growing season. Typically, new and old volunteers and community members join forces to prepare beds, build structures, sow seeds and help with all the important jobs that need to be done to start the new season. It’s an opportunity to meet new people, get your hands dirty and support and enjoy valuable community spaces.

Of course, this year it will look very different due to Covid restrictions, but we are still keen for Good to Grow day to go ahead, both physically and virtually, to highlight and acknowledge all the brilliant work community spaces have been doing over the past year to support and feed the local community. We have built on resources from previous years to support gardens to host Covid-safe physical events and keep people connected through exciting virtual events.

Registration for the Good to Grow event opens on the 24^th February with our launch event ‘Spring into Action’. Once you register your garden, you will be able to access a toolkit of resources, including, Covid-safe signage, event planning, ideas for sessions, social media toolkit and much more.

The history

The Big Dig Day started as an event run by Capital Growth in 2012 to engage volunteers in local food growing projects. Funding was also received to roll this out across the UK , recruiting 7,500 new volunteers to take part in community gardening. These local networks continue to recruit and engage volunteers locally.

In 2019 the Big Dig Day took place on Saturday the 27th of April. The day went national with over 100 gardens participating from across the UK.  People could use our interactive map to find a garden to volunteer with for the Big Dig day. Activities, hours and locations varied so that volunteers could find the right garden for them.

Since the Big Dig was first launched in 2012, a growing number of gardens have been adopting a ‘no dig’ approach to food growing and to reflect that we surveyed our members to find a new name that was more inclusive and representative of our network. After a great debate and lots of ideas, Good to Grow was voted in as the overwhelming favourite.

“Good to Grow is far more all encompassing in my opinion, great name!”

“Big Dig is just not appropriate to our project which is run on organic and no dig principles.”

“Good to know, it might be – Good to Grow!”

“Good to Grow seems to me more inclusive”