Home Gardening Resurgence During COVID: Motivations and Perceived Benefits of Participating in Grow This!

Gardening is associated with a wide array of health benefits. We describe the dissemination of a low-cost social media-based campaign (Grow This!), an intervention intended to reach novice gardeners and which combined elements of old (seeds) and new (Facebook) technology. Grow This! was implemented before (2018, 2019) and during (2020) the COVID pandemic, providing an interesting framework for understanding participants' motivations for gardening. Pre- and post-surveys assessed a variety of topics, including participants' motivations for participating in Grow This!, how they planned to participate, previous gardening experience, the main benefits attributed to participation, and intentions to garden in the future. Descriptive statistics and qualitative analysis were used to analyze the survey data. More than 25,000 people participated in Grow This! over the 3 years, with the majority (77%) participating as a family. Participation in the project spiked during COVID. Primary motivations for participating in Grow This! pre-COVID were education, enjoyment, family engagement, and self-sufficiency; during COVID, motivations remained the same, but shifted in rank. Just over a third of participants were novice gardeners. Participants attributed numerous benefits to their participation, including stress reduction/relaxation, more outdoor time, reduced grocery bills, and eating more fruits and vegetables than normal. A total of 83% of respondents reported being highly likely to have a garden in the future. Home gardening as an intervention is ripe for dissemination, particularly in the aftermath of COVID. Public health professionals can benefit from this understanding of people's motivations to garden and the perceived benefits associated with gardening.