Some Americans consider gardening a hobby, while others think of it as physical activity. Gardening ornaments your yard with beautiful flowers and nutritious produce. What’s more, gardens are a way of socializing with like-minded people. Moreover, it offers a plethora of lifelong health benefits.
Often in fear of food contamination, most people turn themselves into gardeners. Equipped with rakes and spades, they cultivate essential fresh fruits and vegetables for their dinner table.
People find gardening therapeutic for the body and soul. The tasks of raking, digging, and planting is an exercise for your muscle group. Moreover, this can be a fun pursuit with nature for your kid.
Unbeknownst to them, the health benefits of gardening ensure their wellness. You will be surprised to know the unique benefits of gardening.
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What Is Gardening?
In scientific terms, gardening is the cultivation technique of plants. It is the harmonious growing of vegetables, herbs, and flowers in a plot of land. The simple principles of physiology, botany, and chemistry can be infused together by a gardener to create natural results.
This practice uses an unused space of soil to help vegetation thrive. Gardening intervention is a spontaneous activity that entices the enthusiasm of many humans. People invoke a sense of strength and satisfaction within themselves by creating this harmony with nature.
Gardens are soothing to the eyes, and some may consider it therapy. Moreover, this is a spontaneous way of connecting the human mind to natural entities. It is visually stimulating and mentally calming for people.
No matter how good it sounds, exertion can cause risks. Keeping moderation on gardening is crucial. Sometimes too much of something becomes hazardous for health and causes disease. The excitement levels should be of a comfortable pace. Men or women cannot spend long hours in the sun getting mesmerized with their produce.
10 Health Benefits Of Gardening
Gardening enables you to produce fresh and healthy food that works wonders for your body. Along with this, the process itself can improve everything. Spending 20 minutes in the garden can influence positive changes in your lifestyle factors.
Gardening is the perfect venture to be a part of if you lead a sedentary life.
Gardening activities are innocent with unparalleled risk management benefits. Keep reading to gather information about the advantages of gardening. In addition, the excellent health benefits of gardening will leave you amazed.
1. Helps Fight Diseases
Gardening in the dirt and under the sun gives you exposure to sunlight and fresh air. Your skin absorbs Vitamin D from the sun. The regulation of Vitamin D levels keeps you healthy. This nutrient helps in calcium absorption. In turn, calcium promotes healthy bones.
Overexposure to direct sunlight can subject your skin to sunburn. However, with proper clothing, you can prevent this from happening. An estimated 30 minutes in the sunlight can facilitate 8 to 50 thousand IUs of Vitamin D.
Having a prolonged exposure to the sun reduces the chances of cancer and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. A little sunshine can be a source of Nectar for your body.
Being outdoors increases your oxygen intake. It helps with the increase of serotonin levels in your body. Serotonin secretion makes you feel happier and refreshes your mood. In addition, gardening is a stress relief activity.
2. Helps Excercise
The principal benefit of gardening is the process of physical exercise. Exercise enables your well-being. The activities you perform while gardening encompass moderate and vigorous exercise. Vitamin D assists with future risks, whereas exercise helps regulate blood pressure levels.
Gardening tasks like cutting the grass and raking the garden dirt are light activities. On the contrary, extensive tasks like chopping wood or shoveling require strength. It makes your muscles tired and promotes better sleep.
Active gardeners have better regulation of hormones. This aspect reduces the risk of any illness or disease. Working in the dirt will help you sleep peacefully at night. Moreover, physical exertion promotes better eating habits and prevents weight gain.
3. Helps With Memory
Excercise influences brain nerve growth factors. Therefore, the clarity in cognitive functions is improved. Working with garden products, a person can facilitate growth in their brain cells.
According to researchers in Korea, spending time in a vegetable garden can help treat dementia. The study participants took part in research related to 20 minutes gardening. These patients from an inpatient facility were able to show an increase in their neural links and memory.
Horticulture therapy uses gardening to improve the mental health of dementia patients aged 70 to 82. In Scandinavia, this is an effective way of creating a gardening group where people work on farms and gardens.
You can spend at least 20 minutes a day in the sun working on plants. This way, your brain activity will benefit exponentially from it. Moreover, the feeling of dirt in your hands will affect your cortisol levels and invoke a sense of bliss.
4. Saves Money
Growing your produce in a vegetable garden will reduce the grocery bill. You will have your service of vegetables and fruits to choose from. However, you cannot grow a wide variety of produce in your garden.
You will have access to plants with a better taste that are organically grown. As a person, the pride of harvesting your food will give you a positive mind. On the bright side, your next trip to your favorite retail supermarket store will be cheaper.
It is very cheap to have nutritious homegrown tomatoes, kale, or broccoli. There will be a feeling of joy while cutting your homegrown vegetables, cooking them, and eating. Saving money can relieve stress and enhance positive mental health.
With your own garden space, there will be total control over the organic growth of your products without the use of pesticides. You will work hard and, in a few weeks, reward yourself with delicious food from your vegetable gardens.
5. Boosts Your Mood
With insight from a community gardening program in the United States, gardening has proved to have a positive effect on self-esteem. Spending time in the essence of your garden will improve your frame of mind. Gardening boosts
Study shows that some depressed people benefit from gardening in just 12 weeks. This effect lasted for a long time before another session was required. The fresh air and natural sounds coupled with accomplishment cause stress relief.
Your self-esteem will increase due to the reduction of the cortisol or stress hormone. One of the most positive benefits of gardening is your positive well-being. Staying in your garden around greenery and hard work will naturally boost your spirit. Being in your garden can make your brain activity stronger.
You will feel happy! Gardening runs parallel to exercise, known for stimulating the human frame of mind.
6. Socializing
Everywhere we see, the advertisement of gardening reloves around activities with family. Therefore, gardening should be enjoyed with your loved ones. This dedicated opportunity to connect with your family and friends invokes a beneficial codependence.
You can connect with everyone and make a stronger bond than compensates for loneliness. Gardening is enjoyable and fun for all ages. This outdoor initiative can get your entire family to work in sync.
You can interact with your neighbors and share progress stories. Having meals together using the ingredients from your vegetable gardens will help build positive relationships. You can flourish with this type of human interaction. Working with different people from variable age groups may expand your knowledge about yourself.
The community garden brings citizens together. Being part of the reading group is not exciting anymore. Therefore, putting in a shared effort at community gardens helps them find people to have a conversation with.
You get to interact with natural elements with people you care about. It increases your belongingness and reduces anger. Gardening positively benefits your emotions and behavior. Moreover, these interactions cause laughter that can improve your heart health.
7. Helps With Addiction
If you are suffering from addiction, gardening can help you change your life. Study shows that people were provoked to have positive feelings from gardens in addiction recovery programs.
Horticulture therapy is an effective rehabilitation initiative. Gardening gave people suffering from alcohol addiction a new purpose and the strength to live for something greater.
Choosing gardening at rehabilitation programs gave them a higher rate of recovery. Plants have a calming effect on humans. Being around a garden that you help take care of gives you a sense of purpose and happiness.
With the proper professional support, you can receive treatment through the benefits of gardening. It is a supportive therapy that helps you recover with a healthy diet. Along with that, you will have to follow daily gardening exercises.
With gardening, anyone suffering from addiction can have reduced anxiety and a better immune system.
8. Helps Reduce Stress
Daily life and work in the 21st century have proven to be more and more stressful. Researchers claim that stress levels have increased since working hours and workloads have increased in the past few years. With such high levels of stress, an activity to relieve the effects of stress and restore some peace of mind is necessary.
Gardening has proven to be an excellent stress-buster for a wide range of people. The act of interacting with nature has reduced stress levels and has had a calming effect on people. In a 2011 study, researchers asked one group of people to read and the other to garden to test stress recovery.
The group that gardened had lower cortisol levels (stress hormone) compared to the group that read books. The ones who had done gardening also said their moods had been restored to a positive state. Not many people from the reading group reported the same.
Gardening is a very calming process, and research has shown that it can help alleviate the effects of stress on the body.
9. Helps With Ecoanxiety
The rising effects of climate change have created a sense of guilt among a large number of individuals. This has contributed to increased anxiety and stress levels. The American Psychological Association has deemed this as a real and serious issue. The feeling of being powerless in such situations can significantly increase this kind of anxiety and stress.
Gardening helps provide you with a sense of agency and power. Doing something as small as watering your plants and pulling out weeds helps you feel like you are doing your part to help. Applying smart gardening techniques also helps reduce your resource wastage and cut down on your carbon usage.
Using drip lines and mulch to cut down water consumption and using manual tools instead of gas-powered ones are some of the best ways to help the environment in your own way. Such practices also help cut down stress and anxiety levels.
10. Helps Improve Sleep
Gardening has multiple health benefits ranging from reducing stress levels or preventing certain diseases. Another crucial advantage of gardening is that it helps you sleep better. The act of gardening is a tiring one. This helps people sleep better and often earlier than usual.
Simple acts like cutting grass and raking leaves tire out the body enough to promote better sleep. Gardening also helps reduce stress and anxiety levels. This helps you fall asleep more easily. Lower levels of stress and anxiety are also linked with deeper sleep.
If you suffer from a lack of sleep, gardening will definitely help you sleep better and be less stressed and anxious when you get into bed.
Final Words
Gardening is one of the best activities to maintain your health. Apart from the joy of doing it, gardening has many benefits for your body and mind. Your strength, immunity, and sleep are affected in positive ways through gardening.
Gardening is also associated with reducing stress levels and anxiety levels among people. A few hours of gardening a week will give you a more peaceful and calm mental state.
Whether you tend to a small patch in your backyard or a community garden, gardening will definitely be a valuable addition to your life.
James Fields is the founder of Gardener to Farmer. His passion for gardening goes back to his childhood days when he would visit his grandfather during the holidays and help him with the plants in the backyard. This has now translated to creating a dependable resource for gardening.