Gardening to Heal Yourself and the Earth

When the season turns to spring I always find myself impatient to begin planting. I plant herbs, vegetables, melons, and flowers, and this year am going to embark on a berry section of my garden. All my gardening is limited by the deer – it all has to exist inside the fenced area I have, so planning is super important. Deciding what to plant is based off what my family eats the most. Tomatoes certainly top the list and it would be wonderful for me to get to a point that I can grow all the tomatoes my family needs in a year. Cucumbers, peppers, lettuce, spinach, broccoli, and zucchini all make the list as well as various herbs.

There are many reasons I feel gardening is important, a few of them being:

• Better physical health

• Better quality vegetables

• Less environmental impact

• Improved mental health

Better Physical Health

By now I’m sure you know that sitting for long periods of time has a negative impact on your overall heath. It increases cardiovascular disease, risk of type 2 diabetes, and obesity to name a few. Our culture centers around sitting. We all sit to work, sit to socialize, sit to relax. Add in gardening and you will get in some active hours daily, especially in the height of the season. Not only does gardening get you up and outside, it also gets you doing movements you may not be used to. You squat to weed or plant or pick, you work your back and arms to dig with a shovel or weed with a tool and then to carry your haul back to the house. It involves a lot of activity that doesn’t feel like exercise and that has another benefit to your health: better quality vegetables.

Better Quality Vegetables

As soon as a food is picked from the earth it stops creating nutrients and the nutrients actually start to deteriorate. There are ways to make foods ripen off the vine, but all that is happening in that process is a change of color and texture. If a food ripens on the vine/tree/bush and is eaten relatively soon it will have the maximum amount of vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients possible and will offer you all the health benefits associated with them (of which there are many). Much of the food in grocery stores in the US comes from Mexico, Central America and even Canada. While it is great we can get any food we want all year round, that food is not as nutritious as it would be coming from your garden. All that shipping around means the food needs to be picked early so it isn’t rotten by the time it reaches its destination, and the less ripe many foods are the harder they are and the better they live through shipping. Which then takes us into my next point, gardening is better for the planet.

Less Environmental Impact

Shipping food all over the planet uses a lot of fossil fuels. My goal is to one day get to the level of permaculture farming where I save my own seeds and use all my own compost so that I am not relying on anything being shipped to grow food. Because when you buy ANYTHING at the store there is an environmental impact from that item. It was created somewhere likely using fossil fuels, then shipped perhaps to a processing facility, then the store you’re buying it from, then you take it home. Whenever you can buy local or grow your own you are saving a lot of fossil fuels that you likely didn’t think about because it is all happening in the background. There is also a lot of packaging saved when you grow your own. Take herbs for example. If you need dill for a recipe, you go to the store and buy a plastic package of fresh dill only to use about 2 tablespoons of it. Then if you didn’t plan well the rest gets tossed because it goes bad before you use it. Sound familiar? Herbs are so easy to grow, you don’t even need a yard, just pots. And then you can pick what you need, the rest keeps growing and there was no plastic packaging used. And it is also much cheaper, which is something I know we can all get behind.

Better Mental Health

I didn’t have a cute segue into this one, but it is also such a great side effect of gardening. Gardening can decrease anxiety, depression, stress, and increase overall feelings of wellness. By getting outside and your hands in the dirt you are connecting directly to nature and getting sunlight which are two things hugely lacking in our culture. You are basically a plant, honor that. You need dirt, sunshine and water to flourish and gardening brings you into contact with them all. The increased nutrient content of your foods will also support healthy cognitive function and stress response.

Did I convince you to start a garden yet? I hope so! Even if it is just a little windowsill of potted herbs on the sunny side of your house. And if you really can’t get into gardening, look up a local CSA and enjoy better quality food while connecting to people in your community.