Tips from Olle Garden Bed: Six Amazing Benefits Of Backyard Gardening
The value you get from gardening far exceeds the vegetables produced on your plot. It can be therapeutic, healthy, educational, community, environmentally friendly and good exercise. The vegetables you harvest are just the tip of the iceberg. Gardening provides us with more "seeds". The following content also has some reference value for raised garden beds.
- Health benefits of gardening
Gardening as a sport
For those who have spent some time in the garden, it is not surprising that gardening can be a good source of exercise. Tasks such as raking leaves, mowing lawns and waging war on weeds often provide moderate exercise, while digging holes and shoveling compost may be much more rigorous.
In my own garden, I put rainwater in buckets around my house, and then carry buckets of water across the yard to my garden. I like to start the season with a smaller bucket, and then try to move a larger bucket at the end of summer.
Because of my old watering system, it seems that every day is an arm day, but gardening also includes various sports, such as bending, squatting and stretching, which is also conducive to flexibility.
Gardeners with back problems or mobility problems may need to consider using raised garden beds. These eliminate kneeling and make gardening more ergonomic.
After a whole day of gardening, most people can easily have a good sleep!
Absorb some vitamin D
Did you know that vitamin D is usually called "sunshine vitamin"? The more time you spend outdoors, the more vitamin D you absorb through your skin. Half an hour outdoors is enough to provide you with all the vitamin D you need for a day.
Most gardeners have many tasks to do in the sun. Fortunately, vitamin D has various health benefits for them, including:
Build healthy teeth and bones
Improve immune system function
Reduce the risk of heart disease, dementia and common flu
Raise your mood
- The benefits of gardening to children
Gardening encourages picky eaters to try more vegetables
If you have a picky eater in your family, you may be familiar with this scene: you prepare a nutritious home dish, put it in front of your children, and then watch them push it onto the plate until it gets cold, and they no longer want it. It's terrible. Such is the case.
Sports literacy
Gardening gives children the opportunity to practice moving their bodies in large and small ways. Young children may like to practice gross motor skills through watering, digging and raking, while older children can test their fine motor skills through tasks such as transplanting, sowing and weeding.
Emotional maturity
Taking care of the garden is beneficial, but it can also be a lot of work. The bed needs weeding. Vegetables need to be watered regularly. These tasks may be a good opportunity to teach children responsibility. If they want to grow great tomatoes, they need to devote themselves to this work.
As gardeners, they also need to be patient. Planting a vegetable garden takes time.
Gardening reduces children's allergies
A study conducted by Harvard Medical School found that exposing children to gardens and outdoor games at a young age may play a role in preventing allergies, asthma and autoimmune diseases.
- Benefits of gardening on mental health
Antidepressant characteristics of soil microorganisms
Whether you realize it or not, we owe our gardening pleasure to soil microorganisms. They are an important part of healthy plants. Microbes not only help plants absorb nutrients and protect themselves from diseases; Believe it or not, they can also have a significant impact on mental health.
The fun of harvesting your own food
Nothing is more natural than harvesting your own food.
- Benefits of planting vegetable garden
When the coronavirus swept the world earlier this year, the first thing people did was turn to gardening. The garden supplies store quickly ran out of grafts and seed packs. The seed company was given a month long waiting list. The soil and compost sellers never had free time among their bobcats.
As anxiety about food security is imminent, people turn to vegetable gardening to prepare for the uncertain future. The self-sufficiency that comes from knowing how to grow your own food is very powerful.
A garden can start with very little money. Most seed packs cost only a few dollars. You can choose to build an elevated bed with whatever is available (recycled cedar fence boards are my favorite), or keep it simpler by turning over part of the yard and planting it directly underground.
Growing your own vegetables means that you have a free source of food near your home, and you can ensure that food is grown in a way that is free of chemicals and harmful pesticides, if you like. Food grown in backyard gardens tends to taste better because it matures on plants longer.
Gardening is a rare hobby, because the longer you spend gardening, it will become exponentially cheaper. I often save seeds from my garden, which means I don't need to buy some types of seeds the next year.
Radish, lettuce, beans, peas, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and pumpkin seeds are easy to collect. You also need to ensure that the seeds of the best plants in your garden are preserved. This increases the chances of having strong, healthy plants next year.
- Benefits of schools and community gardens
The community garden is a good place to meet neighbors and establish contacts. You may think that sharing the garden with strangers is the worst. Others may take more than their fair share of the product. Worst of all, chatting with strangers.
Interestingly, strangers you meet may be the best part of community gardening.
- Environmental benefits of gardening
Your garden minimizes your carbon footprint
The garden is not just a place to fill your plate and rejuvenate your mind and body; They can be a promise to build a cleaner planet. Do you know that food production accounts for 25% of global carbon emissions? The annual carbon amount is 13.7 billion tons!
Backyard gardening is also an opportunity to focus on organic gardening techniques that avoid chemicals that may adversely affect your environment and harm local wildlife.
As a gardener, you have a unique opportunity to make a choice, which will greatly benefit the life of bees near you.
Therefore, since you know that gardening can improve physical and mental health, provide children with a lot of learning opportunities, support local wildlife, build community awareness and reduce carbon footprint, you may have started to wonder how to start your own garden.
Start with the baby step. Put some flowerpots on the windowsill, and then start with some herbs. Plant a simple garden with lettuce, radish and beans. Scatter some wild flower seeds in your yard. Check out articles like How to Start Living Gardens and Important Things to Know Before Starting Gardens
Anyone can garden. It just needs a little patience. The rewards you get from gardening are well worth your efforts.