If you can beat the bunnies, deer, grasshoppers, weeds, rocks, hail, cold (in high altitude and northern areas), heat (in hot areas), and various bad soils (by amending), you can grow food! 🙂 I often think of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s stories of literally months of work and losing most of a crop to hail or locusts. It’s always a gamble, but, what follows are gardening benefits that are NOT a gamble!!- Exercise.
- Fresh air.
- Vitamin D. According to some sources, approximately 30 minutes in the sun a day (without sunscreen) should provide for the body to make enough vitamin D. Sunscreen makes me very sick anyway, even on other people 50 yards away. So if I’m going to be out more than 30 minutes or so, I wear long sleeves. I always wear a long skirt or pants and often wear a bandanna. In addition, eating fish apparently helps protect against skin cancer, and I love fish.
- Connecting with nature. I love the birdsong, prairie breezes, wildflowers, butterflies.
- Earthing (grounding), if you go barefoot or sit down to plant things. (Please do your own research on parasites and other risks of walking barefoot outside.) Click http://wellnessmama.com/5600/earthing-sleep/ for more information on earthing.
- Time to think and “slow down,” away from electronics and “modern life” (don’t carry your phone to the garden LOL).
- Time to spend with others if you garden together.
- Wonderful gardening lessons for children. One year I recruited the neighbor girl to help me with my tomatoes, and she was enthralled with the whole process! It was 17 years ago and is still to me a sweet memory of time with her.
If you do not have a garden and are interested, this is a great time of year to take a peek at other people’s gardens and see what you like, do some research, and begin dreaming and planning.
If you have no land, some people garden in pots and others enjoy community garden plots where they can plant their own vegetables.
What are your favorite things about gardening?
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