Inspiring people to get growing

What with the British weather being as it is, the glorious sunshine for Bristol’s first ever ‘arts trail for growing veg’ on June 11th was surely a sign that the gods approved. Forum helped to organise the Get Growing Trail as part of our Sustainable Bristol work, which aims to make the West of England the most sustainable city region in the UK and one of the top green cities in the world.

The point of Get Growing was to celebrate local food growing projects, and to inspire more people to get involved with them. 23 community gardens opened on the day, offering visitors the chance to have a look around the site, meet garden members, get advice on growing and take part in lots of fun family activities. A smallholding even slaughtered one of their prize pigs for a barbecue! Another garden offered homemade elderflower champagne to visitors, and veg was dug up on demand. There were also cookery demos, plant sales, and seed planting. Overall, around 1000 people visited the gardens across Bristol, which was a great result for the first year of the trail.

The friendliness and enthusiasm of the garden members (plus the sunshine!) resulted in some fantastic feedback: over half of visitors said that they’d been inspired to start growing their own food by visiting a garden, and just under half said they were inspired to join a community gardening group. The garden groups that took part were really positive about the day, saying that they really valued being part of a city wide event, and attracted lots of new members and volunteers.

We’ve produced a short report about the event which you can read here. And you can see more photos on our Flickr page.