The Big Dig launches
By Ed Mitchell 29th October 2012
Are you involved in a local food project? This new nationwide project from Sustain looks interesting:
Join the Big Dig and become part of a national urban food growing network
Sustain: the alliance for better food and farming is launching a drive to get more towns and cities signed up to its urban food growing campaign. The Big Dig is a new project which aims to help community food gardens get more people involved in volunteering on their sites.
The focus of the project’s funding is on six cities around England, but Sustain are really keen to use the work that will be happening in these six cities to form the platform for a much more extensive food growing network across the towns and cities of the UK. To do that we need food growing spaces around the country to get involved in the Big Dig.
We held our first national event – Edible Gardens Open Day – in September 2012. 116 gardens took part making it the biggest ever community food growing open day and over 3,000 people visited the sites. We want our next event in March 2013 to be even bigger and better, but we need your help to get more gardens involved to make this happen.
Our March event will be all about getting people actually down to their local garden and get digging. We hope it will be the biggest ever national community growing volunteering day.
We’d like to use the day as an opportunity to help food growing spaces in towns and cities across the UK recruit more volunteers. We will be doing press and media work around the day on behalf of the project nationally and will also be providing publicity materials for participating spaces, as well as discounted gardening supplies, prizes and seeds for the gardens that are involved.
So at the moment, we are looking to find community food gardens that might be interested in being part of the Big Dig. Any size garden can join as long as it is run by and for the community. We are also looking to engage CSAs and market gardens where their volunteer pool is coming mainly from a local town or city so there may also be projects around your town or city that would fit that bill.
So if you running a community food garden or know of one in an urban area then please get in touch via email.
We’d be delighted to have you on board.