The benefits of gardening don’t stop at just making the planet an easier place to live. You can get some genuinely great gardening benefits for your health, physically and mentally.
7 good benefits you can get from gardening
So what can you get from taking care of your plants? Let’s discuss the importance of gardening below.
1. Gardening Improves Mental Clarity
When gardening, there is a lot of information to remember and perform, like where a type of plant is, when to water the plant, when to fertilize, and more. The information increases higher the bigger your garden is.
This benefit helps improve and sharpen your memories. Gardening requires you to keep track of many tasks at the same time. and the more often you use your brain, the more clarity your overall mentality gets
2. Gardening boosts your mood
When spending some time outside and working in your garden, you could expect your anxiety level to decrease and to feel less depressed. This is one of the mental health benefits of gardening.
There is a study about how gardening affects depressed people where those who had diagnosed with depression participated in a 12-week gardening intervention.
The researcher measured from these people many figures from many mental health aspects before and after gardening.
The result is that those participants had seen a great improvement compared to before gardening. This improvement also lasts for a long time after the gardening intervention.
Also Read: Medicinal Plants to Keep in Your Garden & Home
3. Gardening improves strength
When gardening, you perform lots of tasks, from small tasks like raking or cutting grass to moderate tasks like shoveling or chopping. Those tasks make your body exercise, work your muscles, and increase your strength.
And eventually, you will use all major muscles in your body by just constantly gardening alone. This is especially important for elders who need strength to stay healthy.
There are also some other benefits for your body when gardening, for example, helping with weight gain and sleeping better and fuller.
4. Organic food helps eat healthier
The nutritional contents in organic food are higher and more than traditionally-grown foods. There are also fewer pesticides in organic food.
Because of how it is grown, organic food is often fresher, thanks to the lack of preservatives. It is also better for the environment by reducing pollution, improving soil’s condition, conserving water, using less energy, and more.
5. Gardening provides vitamin D
This is one of the fun facts about gardening: you and the plants are quite similar in getting nutrients from sunlight. While the plants perform photosynthesis to get oxygen, you use your skin to convert the sunlight into vitamin D.
Researchers estimate that your body can produce from 8.000 up to 50.000 units of vitamin D. The figure may vary depending on how much your clothes cover you and the color of your skin.
Vitamin D brings lots of good benefits to your health. Together with calcium, vitamin D promotes your bones’ health and development.
Vitamin D can also boost your immune system and lowers the risk of many conditions like prostate cancer, multiple sclerosis development, bladder cancer, colorectal cancer, and more.
6. Gardening Lowers Stress Levels
Gardening and mental health have a strong connection to each other, and another mental health benefit of gardening is that it can lower your stress levels.
After a stressful event, you should start to feel better, and your stress level should be lower.
There was a study where participants were exposed to the stressful stimulus. Then they are split into 2 groups, one to do gardening, and the other to read quietly.
The results show that those who did gardening had lower stress-hormone levels compared to the other group. They also experience a positive state with increased mood.
Also Read: How To Create An Irresistibly Romantic Garden
7. Gardening Burns a High Amount of Calories
Gardening is a moderate-intensity level of exercise since the scale of gardening increases higher when you are dealing with a bigger garden. When gardening, you could burn up to 330 calories per hour of doing gardening.
There is a study that shows people’s BMI figures decreased when they participated in a community gardening program. So you try gardening if you need to lose some weight.
Frequently asked questions
a. Can gardening help improve the immune system?
Exposing yourself to the sun can create vitamin D that contributes to a better immune system. But there is another way gardening improves your health overall.
Having dirt under your fingernail may seem dirty, but that could be the sign of great health. Dirt contains some bacteria that can help improve your immune system to resist sickness and infections better.
Also Read: How Healthy Lawn and Yard Benefit Your Family Health
b. What’s the easiest vegetable to grow when gardening?
Gardening is not easy to start. But, with the proper skills and tools, you should do just fine in your very own garden. These are the easy-to-grow vegetable for you to get started
- Salad leaves: You can plant salad during the summer. They can be harvested 3 weeks after you first grow them. The salad leaves will continue to grow for you to keep harvesting.
- Radishes: they are easy to grow in the summer. You can either grow them in a container or plant them in the ground as you normally would.
- Peas: You can plant peas from March to June, just sow into the ground and water them. Remember to build support for their stems.
Conclusion
With the above 7 health benefits of gardening, you should know how well taking care of your plants in the garden helps you in many ways, physically and mentally as well.
Now go ahead and get yourself a nice, lovely garden.
