Is Gardening Really Good For Your Health & Wellbeing?

I touched upon the subject back in March 2021 and as I said then I should start this post by making it abundantly clear I am in no way expert or have any type of qualifications. This article is based purely on my experience. This post isn't about lockdowns and the dreaded C word, it is simply a few words looking at whether gardening is beneficial to your health and wellbeing in general. 

Let me start by saying I think gardening is beneficial for your health and wellbeing, plain and simple. This could be the shortest post on a blog ever! 

That said let me explain my thinking on the matter and why I believe it would benefit everyone to have a few hours a week gardening. 

I appreciate not everyone has a garden so when I say 'gardening' in this piece I am including a few pots in a backyard or on a balcony or of course house plants for those with no outdoor space. The benefits of having plants around you, indoors or out, are many. Indoors a few plants dotted around your property will help purify the air, there are numerous studies on the matter and it is scientific fact. Plants cheer you up. Having plants around you helps you to relax, okay a couple of Cacti plants in the living room is a long way from a stroll through the woods on a sunny morning, but it works. Plants in the bedroom can also help you sleep. Google it, I am not making this stuff up. 

For those lucky enough to have a plot to work with the benefits from gardening are huge. These benefits, I believe, are that connection with nature, the relaxing and arguably therapeutic power of gardening and of course if you grow vegetables the simple fact of eating healthily. Gardening can also give you a pretty thorough workout as anyone who has dug over a vegetable plot will testify (unless of course you are no dig). It is estimated in some studies I have read that the simple of act of mowing the lawn will burn 125-150 calories with the bigger jobs in the garden such as digging or chopping wood burning over 400 calories per hour!

I have also read many an article about the destressing advantages or gardening. I am not a particularly stressful sort of bloke, far from it in fact, but perhaps at least one of the reasons for my laid back nature is the time I spend gardening. I think this is perhaps the one big thing with gardening, THE thing it does to help with  health and wellbeing. 

You can rarely rush gardening. You have to work in conjunction with Mother Nature, if the old girl decides winter isn't over just yet there is nothing you as a gardener can do about it. You learn to live with the seasons and become more in tune with the world around you. Anyone who has sown seeds too early on a bright spring morning, and I am guilty of this, only to find that by the end of the week frosts or even snow has returned will understand what I am talking about. You  might want to sow your carrot seeds in early March, but if old Mother Nature says there is a few more weeks of winter yet then that is that; she is not a lady to be argued with.

Sowing seeds, potting on seedlings, planting out young plants, dividing established plants, digging the veg patch, mowing the lawn, deadheading the Dahlias, watering, feeding, checking plants for pests..............none of these gardening jobs can be rushed. The moment you walk into your garden or onto your plot the very act of gardening slows you down and, in turn, relaxes you. I have on countless occasions ventured into the garden for half-an-hour or so only to find myself still out there two maybe three hours later. There is always another little job that can be done and once you have surrendered yourself to the garden everything else fades away and chances are you will potter on for far longer than was ever planned. I can become completely lost in the garden, thinking of nothing else, not a care or a worry other than perhaps spotting the first black fly on the Runner Beans! 

Lastly, but by no means least, gardening is such a positive pastime one where you are often planning ahead and thinking of what is to come. In sowing a seed you are planning for the future hoping that seed will germinate, grow into a seedling and eventually an established plant. As is sit in the conservatory looking at the veg patch in December with no more than a few weather torn Parsnip stems showing above ground and the Green Manure growing strongly I am planning and looking forward to a bountiful 2022; and a few roast dinners yet with the Parsnips! 

Cheers 🍺