It’s good for morale
Who says garden says outside and therefore sun, if the weather is mild. Gardening allows you to cut yourself off from your daily worries related to professional life and to concentrate on nature, while taking a breath of fresh air. Practiced a little every day or even just a few hours on the weekend, gardening brings a particular satisfaction to see its plants flourish over the days. Nothing better to chase away depression and say goodbye to burnout. In 2011, a scientific study conducted on people over 50 even showed that people who garden find life less monotonous and boring than others. Growing plants, even on your balcony or at your window, gives you a sense of duty, accomplishment and control that leads to improved self-esteem, and that’s still good news.
We activate without thinking about it
Behind the clichés and received ideas hides a reality: gardening is physical. Admittedly, an hour of gardening will never be equivalent to an hour of marathon at high speed, but all the same, the garden makes us move. Recent research has highlighted the benefits of this nature activity, and indicates that half an hour of gardening several times a week is enough to reduce the risk of hypertension, diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Repetition of various movements (bending down, bending the knees, etc.) improves flexibility and the condition of the bones, muscles and joints. osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritisconstipation and overweight are also reduced by gardening activity.
Concretely, three and a half hours of gardening correspond to a loss of 1,000 Kilocalories, which is equivalent to almost two hours of jogging. Doctors recommend a daily expenditure of 156 Kcal, which translates to 45 minutes of rose pruning or 25 minutes of digging. But those who have smaller gardens can be reassured: planting plants by hand for an hour corresponds to an hour of table tennis or recreational cycling (8 to 10 km/h). Without forgetting to specify that all this is done without thinking about it and allows to recharge the batteries in vitamin D (fixed thanks to the sun).
It’s a creative activity
“Gardening is creating, creating is gardening. This could be a variant of the famous quote from the resistance fighter Stéphane Hessel “To resist is to create”. Even if planting, watering, weeding and sowing seem repetitive and daunting activities, they still encourage creation and inventiveness. “And if I put red in the center of the flower bed and yellow flowers all around? Because gardening is like creating a colorful mandala, a square of greenery or even a planter of thoughts, it stimulates our creativity and our imagination at the service of our environment. Embellishing your daily life, seeing the result evolve day by day and developing your “artist” side, this is an unexpected aspect of gardening. With children, this activity is even more beneficial as it leads to reflection and innovation, to wonder and to express oneself through the plants that are planted.
We rediscover the taste of food
If you’re tired of the bland taste of supermarket tomatoes, greenhouse-raised cucumbers and vitamin-free eggplants, gardening is definitely for you. A tomato that has taken the time to soak up the sun, to ripen properly without adding pesticides will not have the same flavor as those that line the stalls of supermarkets and that have an orange color. Of course, the cucumber will have more seeds, but what a unique taste! Gardening, then harvesting your vegetables, also means remembering that cucumbers are not all slender, that there are an incredible number of different varieties of tomatoes, or that the lettuce does not grow in a plastic bag. If you have children, gardening will make them discover the many different tastes found in the vegetable garden, something to teach them about balanced food. To us the vitamins, minerals and other nutritional virtues of vegetables.
We finally know what we eat
Can we talk about gardening without talking about organic farming and ecology? Cultivating your vegetables, or even simply your herbs on a piece of balcony, means knowing what you put on your plate. If you only use natural treatments authorized in organic farming (present in most garden centers), your vegetables will therefore be without pesticides and other chemicals. This is an indisputable health argument, especially when we know that the famous Roundup® and four other insecticides were singled out as “probable carcinogens” by the World Health Organization on March 20, 2015. And if it is not easy to choose organic at the supermarket, growing your own vegetables allows you to be sure of their traceability, from planting to harvest.
We recreate social ties
Rare are the gardeners who have learned everything on their own and who grow their vegetables in their corner. Gardening often helps to create bonds, whether it is between neighbours, with family or in a club. Gardening means exchanging your know-how with others, asking for advice here and there and even sharing your harvests. It is an activity which, if it seems turned towards oneself, also makes it possible to develop or recreate social ties. Parents and children work together, while grandparents give their advice and bring their experience. But city dwellers can be reassured, there are more and more urban agriculture initiatives in cities, where shared and allotment gardens are developing. Enough to meet people, anchor yourself in your neighborhood and discover your neighborsfar from the feeling of isolation and anonymity sometimes felt when living in the city.
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