Incredible Benefits of Gardening
Gardening is a great hobby to have. It secures food for your table, and it also provides you with a relaxing pastime. As you can see, there are many benefits of gardening you can enjoy. Get a raised garden bed and take advantage today! This content also has some reference value for Olle Garden Beds.
In this post, I've rounded up the top 25 benefits of gardening for you. Above all else, the health benefits of gardening are the main driving force behind the appeal that this activity holds for folks all over. The cultivation of your own plants helps you become more connected with your food, and provides you with more control over what your family eats. Furthermore, gardening is a good way to get fit, whether it's through weeding, mowing the lawn, or other physical exertion. Perhaps most importantly, however, is that gardening offers a whole range of mental benefits for those who take up the practice. Whether it's time away from technology or the opportunity to clear your mind with a walk in the garden, this activity is sure to provide you with stress relief and peace of mind in one fell swoop.
With these multiple proven benefits, and you can experience them by starting and caring for your vegetable, fruit, or herb garden. It also extends to keeping plants happy and healthy with our raised garden bed.
- Gardening lifts your mood
Did you know that gardening can lift your mood as well as boost your self-esteem levels? When you take time out to work in the garden, your anxiety levels will drop and you may start to feel less depressed. One study looked at this benefit of gardening, spanning several years, and took people diagnosed with depression and enrolled them in a 12-week gardening intervention. The researchers measured several aspects of mental health before and after the intervention, including people's depressive symptoms. They found a significant improvement in symptoms in every participant. They also followed the participants for several months and found that the improvements lasted for a long time.
- Gardening boosts your immune system
You and your plants are much more similar than you realize, and your body has the same ability to photosynthesize as they do. This is where your plants use sunlight to make food. Your skin works in the same way, absorbing vitamin D to reap the benefits of gardening. Depending on your skin color and how covered your clothing is, researchers estimate that the sun can produce about 8,000 to 50,000 IU of this vitamin. Vitamin D helps strengthen bones, strengthen the immune system and also helps reduce the risk of multiple sclerosis, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, prostate, bladder, breast and colorectal cancer.
- Gardening helps build connections
Community, home or school-facing container gardens are popping up all over the United States. Some of the main factors driving the popularity of these types of gardens, it has more to do with simple relationships and interaction than the food you get from it. These connections are one of the main benefits of gardening. One study had students film their work before sharing what they had learned. Students reported a sense of well-being from the relationships they made and the new skills they acquired.
One of the great benefits of gardening is bonding with new people and strengthening the ones you have, while you both work toward the common goal of keeping the garden happy, healthy, and thriving.
- Gardening builds your strength
Gardening is exercise because the small tasks you do, such as mowing or raking, fall into the category of light or moderate exercise. However, you can also dig, shovel, and chop wood to achieve moderate exercise at this level. All of these tasks ensure that you build muscle, which can help you build strength. When you work in the garden, you end up using every major muscle group you have, which is one of the main benefits of gardening for older people. Gardening can help people gain weight for their age, with researchers finding it can help people get seven hours of sleep a night.
- Gardening lowers stress levels
Another benefit of gardening is that it lowers your stress levels. It can help you recover and recover after stressful events. One study exposed people to stressful stimuli. Then they split up into small groups, with one going to garden and the other reading quietly. The researchers then tested the levels of stress hormones in each person and found that the gardening group had lower levels of stress hormones than the quiet reading group. The gardening group also reported that their mood had returned to a more positive state than the other group.
- Gardening protects your memory
You can grab a pair of work gloves and head to your garden knowing that it is helping you protect your memories through the benefits of gardening. Exercise improves brain function, and researchers in South Korea decided to prove that it can help protect your memory. They tested the theory by giving the patients 20 minutes of dementia exercises. The residents spent 20 minutes planting and raking the gardens, and they found that they had more brain nerve growth factor than people who didn't participate. The findings held true for both male and female participants.
Remembering everything you have to do in the garden can help improve your memory, which is a huge benefit that gardeners take advantage of.
- Gardening can help with addiction recovery
Horticultural therapy is not a new concept, and such benefits of gardening have been around for years. Many addiction recovery programs include working with plants as part of their agenda. Plants can trigger positive emotions and feelings in people recovering from addiction, making them an effective tool for recovery. One study enrolled people in a rehabilitation program and offered them the opportunity to participate in a natural recovery process. They could choose gardening or art as their chosen therapy, and those who chose gardening had higher completion rates with the program, and they also reported higher levels of satisfaction.
- Gardening reduces the risk of heart attack and stroke
One of the great benefits of gardening is that it can help reduce the risk of heart attack or stroke in people who participate regularly. You can grab your gardening tools, go outside and spend a few hours caring for your plants to help reduce your anxiety and stress levels, which can lower your blood pressure. This, in turn, reduces stress on the cardiovascular system. Studies have shown that over-60s who take part in gardening are 30 per cent less likely to suffer a heart attack or stroke than people in the same age group who do not garden.
- Gardening improves hand flexibility and strength
This benefit of gardening, which requires you to make precise movements, helps increase your hand strength and flexibility. This is especially important as people age, and doctors even recommend rehabilitation programs for stroke victims that include gardening tasks to build up their hand strength and improve their hand work. You should position your body naturally and pay attention to repetitive movements to enjoy the full benefits of gardening and avoid injuries such as carpal tunnel or tendinitis. Also, use both your left and right hands.
All the little gestures are good for gardening, as it can help slowly improve your hand strength and flexibility. The more you garden, the better both will be.
- Gardening helps with aerobic exercise
Whether you raise POTS, indoor flowers, or a larger vegetable garden, this is a great way to take advantage of the benefits of gardening for your daily aerobic exercise. You might even get so involved in your project that you don't realize you're starting to sweat. Reach out and pick up different tools and plants, pull weeds, and flex or twist as you plant to start working new muscle groups throughout your body. In turn, this can help you build flexibility, endurance, and strength the more you do it. When you do other activities, you can slowly lose weight, sleep better, and feel less stressed.
- Gardening can help you eat better
The cost of fresh produce can skyrocket during the off month, leading many to turn to canned vegetables. One of the great things about gardening is that you can harvest a lot of vegetables, and you don't have to be a professional to do it. There are dozens of easy-to-grow vegetables that you can save for later in the year. You might even discover new vegetables that you've never tried before, and you get food that isn't treated with pesticides or herbicides. If you live in the right climate to grow them, you can eat fresh organic vegetables or even fruit.
- Gardening can boost your self-esteem
In the midst of a busy life, it's easy for your self-esteem to dip. This is especially true if you've never done gardening before and aren't sure if you'll be any good at it. One of the benefits of gardening is that it is a natural and quick self-esteem booster. You plant seeds, water, weed, fertilize the garden and watch it grow. As more plants start to grow, your self-esteem will improve. It feels great to complete new tasks, and the garden offers unlimited opportunities to learn new skills.
As your plants start to grow, one of the benefits of gardening is that your self-esteem levels can go through the roof. As the plant grows stronger, you'll be more confident in your abilities and you can start picking fruits or vegetables.
- Gardening burns a lot of calories
Gardening is usually labeled as a moderate intensity level of exercise, and this is especially true if you have a larger garden with perennial vegetables. According to the Centers for Disease Control, you can burn up to 330 calories per hour while working in a light yard or garden. A few years ago, the American Journal of Public Health published a study that showed that people who participated in community gardening programs ended up with a lower BMI than their neighbors who didn't, so you could lose a fair amount of weight while enjoying your work.
- Gardening strengthens bones
As you age, your bones become thinner and more brittle. Your body's levels of vitamin D, the main vitamin that supports bone health, begin to drop. Being outside in the sun and working in the garden will give you more exposure to vitamin D through sunlight. If you wear shorts and a T-shirt when you go outside, this will maximize the amount of vitamin D you absorb each time you go outside. This vitamin D helps prevent brittle and brittle bones.
- Gardening lowers blood pressure levels
Anyone with high blood pressure is at an increased risk of cardiovascular events. One of the benefits of gardening is that it can reduce low blood pressure levels without the help of medication. One way to do this is to naturally reduce your anxiety or stress levels because you enjoy caring for your plants so much. The same phenomenon happens with people who have indoor gardens or plants because they all need to be taken care of. The more time you spend taking care of them, the better for your cardiovascular health. As blood pressure drops, this takes pressure off the arteries.
The more time you spend outdoors, the more your blood pressure levels drop. This benefit of gardening can help several systems in your body to be healthier overall, which can provide you with a better quality of life.
- Gardening can relieve chronic pain
For many people, chronic pain is in the joints. They can become stiff, which makes people less likely to move them because it causes more pain, and it gets stuck in an endless cycle. Gardening can help relieve some of the stiffness caused by chronic pain. You can start small by having a Mediterranean herb garden at home and making an effort to care for it every day. Planting, watering, and maintaining herbs will help you move your joints, which can relieve some of your symptoms. If chronic pain is caused by arthritis, exercise can help increase your range of motion and reduce some swelling.
- Gardening can help you sleep better
Spending hours outside can have the pleasant side effect of exhausting you. It can also help you clear away all the anxious or stressful thoughts that are bothering you, which can help you fall asleep faster. Moderate exercise is one of the other benefits of weeding and caring for your garden, as it can help you feel more tired. In turn, you should be able to fall asleep faster, sleep deeper, and wake up feeling refreshed and ready to take on the day. If you garden every day, you can start sleeping better every night.
- Gardening saves you money
Whether you decide to grow vegetables or want to grow fruit trees, one of the benefits of gardening is that you save money. In general, starting garden seeds are not very expensive, and you can make your own fertilizer from kitchen scraps. You can also collect rainwater to keep plants watered. A small garden can produce an amazing amount of vegetables that you can keep and eat all year round. This saves you money because you don't have to budget for fruits, vegetables, or herbs when you go to the grocery store.
Being able to harvest your own produce is an excellent way to save money during the cooler months of the year when prices rise to a premium. If you save them, you can always eat organic fruits, vegetables, or herbs.
- Gardening exposes you to good bacteria
One of the unexpected benefits of gardening is that it can put you in close contact with a lot of good bacteria. Several studies have shown that strains of bacteria found in garden grime can stimulate your brain to release serotonin, a feel-good chemical that can help fight off symptoms of depression. It can also boost your immune system. This is a theory called the hygiene hypothesis. This theory also suggests that there is a link between your immune system and your brain. Gardening can help improve both.
- Gardening stimulates creativity
Gardening is all about creativity, and one of the great things about gardening is that you can let your creativity thrive. Whether it's placing garden layouts together to maximize your space, or figuring out which vegetables will grow better together, you can get creative. If you have children, you can encourage their creativity levels and ask them to help you set up and maintain the garden. They can even make cute garden signs to help you tell which vegetables you've grown where to keep track of everything. As a bonus, everyone is learning new skills at the same time.
- Gardening encourages mindfulness
Mindfulness is a state of being focused on the present moment, and you see a lot of that in meditation. However, you can achieve the same state with gardening. One of the benefits of gardening is being able to devote your full attention to the task at hand. This ensures that you get all the weeds out, plant everything in the right place, or monitor your vegetables so that they are picked at the best time. You can get lost in what you're doing and spend hours in the garden making sure everything is healthy.
Going out in the garden will help you focus on one task at a time and practice mindfulness. This can help you get into a more calm and focused state of mind that carries over into your daily activities.
- Gardening improves mental clarity
One of the hallmarks of gardening is that you have to remember a lot of information, especially if you have a larger garden. This benefit of gardening helps sharpen your mind while improving your memory. Studies show that gardening forces you to keep track of multiple tasks. You have to keep in mind which vegetables you grew where, their needs, whether you applied natural fertilizers, your watering schedule, and when is the best time to harvest vegetables. You use more parts of your brain, which improves your overall mental clarity.
- Gardening gives you family bonding time
Connecting with family is very important, but can be difficult in the digital age. Many families spend a lot of time in front of a screen, but gardening gives you the chance to turn it back. You can let your children have fun and use this benefit of gardening to make connections. Let them decide which parts of the garden they want to be responsible for and help them look after it. Teach them all the aspects of growing their own food and let them help you preserve or cook food when needed. This can give you hours of bonding time per season.
Get the whole family out and involved in the garden for a few hours a week to connect and catch up with their lives. As a bonus, anyone of any skill level or age can help.
- Teaching responsibility in horticulture
One of the great things about gardening is that it's a fun and stress-free way to teach responsibility to everyone in the family. Your children will learn what can happen if they let weeds take over their garden, and what can happen if you don't water it properly. You can set up each area of the garden for each child or family member. Make them responsible for helping you stay healthy and harvesting vegetables and fruits when needed. This can also encourage people to enjoy doing things outside and with their families.
- Gardening gives you a sense of purpose
A final benefit of gardening is that it can give you a sense of purpose. It's a way of taking care of something and growing it from a small seed to a big plant. Sometimes, this is enough to give you a sense of purpose and pride as the plant takes root and begins to grow. Whether you're working on a larger project like growing raspberries or a smaller one like keeping your houseplants healthy, the feeling is the same. You can keep that sense of purpose by growing plants all year round.