Discover the joy of gardening through this article. Gardening is the practice, and sometimes the art, of sowing, planting, and maintaining plants in a garden in ideal conditions for their development. This practice meets a need for aesthetics and/or food. The same applies to a vineyard if it’s not too big and it’s just your hobby. In this case, your vineyard is also your art.
The term “gardening” is used mainly for leisure, ornamental and self-consumption activities practiced by individuals and entities practicing non-profit direct, while the terms market gardening, horticulture, arboriculture, floriculture… are professional activities that aim to produce and sell fruit, flowers, vegetables, fruit and ornamental trees and various other plant products.
Gardening methods around the world vary according to the climate, soil, uses, and resources available to the gardener.
In this sense, there is a difference between gardening and agriculture. The difference between gardening and agriculture is essentially a difference of scale. It means: gardening can be a hobby or tending towards food self-sufficiency, providing an additional income, while agriculture is part of a profitability approach.
Gardening operations are often manual and use little financial means, typically some hand tools, such as a shovel, rake, basket, watering can wheelbarrow, and hand-made compost. In comparison, agriculture in industrialized countries is more likely to use mechanization, chemical fertilizers, animal manures such as fertilizers and fertilizers, efficient irrigation systems, and so on.
Gardening is generally associated with the maintenance of a garden and less with its creation alone.
Spring is the ideal time to create and/or cultivate your garden, vegetable garden, or balcony. In this season of renewal of nature, the reason does not miss growing vegetables or flowers.
More and more people are rediscovering the culture of the land – A trend is also seen in cities.
In this article, we have listed 12 good reasons for gardening for you.
Reason 1 for the Joy of Gardening: For a Question of Mental Well-Being
Unless you grow tropical plants indoors, gardening often rhymes with the outdoors, fresh air, or even the sun. Taken in our routine, it is sometimes difficult for us to take a step back, to think of something else, or even not to think. In addition to aerating the body, gardening also airs the spirit: focusing on our parcel of land and our plants of vegetables or flowers, we put aside the worries of the job.
In 2016, a British study of 136 gardeners compared to 133 non-garden volunteers showed that weekly gardening improves self-esteem and mood and reduces the risk of depression or anxiety. Data was also found in a study in the heart of Tokyo, a sign that an urban environment does not offset the effects of gardening on morale and mental health.
According to a scientific study conducted by British researchers at the University of Essex and Westminister, doing only 30 minutes of gardening a week increases the feeling of well-being.
It’s no coincidence that more and more hospitals are creating vegetable gardens and therapeutic gardens and offering their patients gardening workshops!
It has been proven that this activity is beneficial for mental health and helps to prevent anxiety disorders, depression, or addiction.
At home, too, you can enjoy the virtues of this “therapy by the garden” or hortitherapy: you just have to take care of the plants you have planted and watch them patiently push to clear your head while being happy and proud of your job.
Reason 2 for the Joy of Gardening: To Do a Physical Activity Otherwise
Gardening is good for the head but also for the body. As long as you do not hurt or hurt your back, this outdoor activity helps keep you fit at any age.
It can even allow you to lose weight or keep the line because it counts for physical activity.
Gardening is a hobby that moves (raking, water, and carrying pots …). We can even say that it amounts to playing sports … without thinking!
Yes! Get the tools, gloves, and water, and bend down to sow, dig, or hoe… Without this, gardening is a physical activity that has the advantage of burning calories without thinking.
If gardening cannot compete with running or swimming, it still allows you to spend some time outdoors. Of course, mowing the lawn, digging, or logging are much more physical activities than planting hyacinths, but all the same! We think that:
– An hour of weeding can burn between 300 and 400 kilocalories, according to its corpulence;
– 45 minutes of rose size or 25 minutes of digging equivalent to at least 150 kcal burned;
– Half an hour of watering the pipe can burn 90 kcal.
Reason 3 for the Joy of Gardening: Gardening to See the Fruit of His Work
In our work or in our personal lives, for example, when we have a long-term project to carry out, or we make a diet to lose weight, the results sometimes take a long to appear. It may take months for things to move forward, which can be discouraging.
On this point, gardening is good: sown at the right time parsley, leeks, eggplant, tomatoes, lamb’s lettuce or lettuce, put in all and for all one to two weeks to lift. This is an opportunity to quickly see the fruit of his work and boost his self-esteem. Gardening also helps to find a link with the land, often lost because of our urban lifestyles.
Reason 4 for the Joy of Gardening: To Eat Healthily and Regain the True Taste of Food
On the one hand, one of the great joys of the amateur gardener is to harvest and consume his production.
When the time of harvest has come, eating fruits and vegetables from your garden will undoubtedly bring you pride and taste pleasure.
But not only! Having your own vegetable garden is a great way to eat more vegetables and, at the same time, increase your intake of fiber, vitamins, and minerals!
Gardening indirectly allows for a healthier, more balanced, and more varied diet while respecting the rhythm of the seasons.
Cultivating a vegetable garden (even small ones) could even reconcile your children with vegetables.
On the other hand, cereals, vegetables, legumes, fruits … Plants are at the heart of our diet. However, they are not always at the heart of our lives: they are often bought mechanically, in a market or in the stalls of a supermarket, without always paying attention to their origin, without knowing how they are pushed, what treatments they have suffered…
In short, without knowing anything about their history and without having participated in their culture – Yet, even gardening, even when trying to grow even a few herbs and vegetables, is not without virtue. […]
Local is the best…
In fact, unless you buy locally produced fruits and vegetables, and little processed, we often find our plate vegetables and fruits that have much more natural. Grown under glass, transported and stored in refrigerated trucks, or even by plane … The fruits and vegetables of the supermarket stalls make a long journey before arriving on our plates. Generally, they are not picked at maturity but too early not to get rotten on display.
All this affects their taste, especially if they are fruits and vegetables that need a lot of sun. To garden is to rediscover the true taste of food since it will have grown in the ground, exposed to real rain and a real sun. To make his vegetable garden makes it possible moreover to cultivate old or little-known varieties, neglect of intensive agriculture because not sufficiently productive. What to vary the flavors and colors!
Reason 5 for the Joy of Gardening: To Eat Organic
There are countless scientific studies showing the dangers of pesticides for health or consumer magazine analyses indicating which varieties of fruits and vegetables are the most contaminated.
As a result, organic farming is on the rise, and more and more consumers are putting organic food in their baskets. But here it is, eating organic can seem compelling or expensive. Buying organic products also requires some confidence in the label, which not all consumers have.
Also, growing your own organic vegetables is a simple way to make sure you eat healthy products. Fertilizers “home,” neighbor’s manure, compost, or products compatible with organic farming sold in garden centers…
The tips are not lacking to manage to grow some vegetables without pesticides. Unless you want to feed a whole regiment or in bad weather conditions, you will easily get a respectable amount of vegetables.
Reason 6: To Save Money
For some gardeners, growing their fruits and vegetables is a way to achieve food self-sufficiency for ecological and/or economic reasons.
By producing oneself, one can eat healthily for less. We have the privilege of consuming fresh and pesticide-free products without breaking the bank.
As a bonus, we find the true taste of strawberries, tomatoes, or pears because these fruits have matured on the plant or on the tree.
This may seem obvious to people who have always had a garden, but for city dwellers, it is a real luxury.
Reason 7: An Ecological Reason Is Worth It
Even if they are grown in France, carrots, cucumbers, potatoes or leeks, and cauliflower travel several tens of kilometers before they are bought. Gardening remains one of the ways to reduce its ecological footprint since vegetables grow a few meters from your home.
Like all plants, the plants in your garden or even your balcony planter consume carbon dioxide (CO2) and release oxygen, which limits the effects of global warming. On a small scale, cultivating your garden allows you to “compensate carbon,” that is to say, to compensate for a small part of your negative activities for the climate (take the car, take a bath, overheat your home, etc.) at the scale of a row of parsley, it does not do much, but it’s already that!
Reason 8: Gardening, to Feel and Remember
The smell of aromatic herbs, the sound of the wind in the foliage, the song of birds, the texture of the earth, the sweetness of a mint leaf, the colors of tomatoes, the taste of Mirabelle plums … In a garden, the five senses are awake, if at all. For young and old alike, strolling in a garden, and taking part in it by working the land and reaping the rewards, can reconnect with all its senses, discover them or rediscover them.
More and more establishments welcoming elderly people, sometimes suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, are developing therapeutic gardens. In fact, for the elderly whose memory fails, gardening often makes it possible to bring out buried memories, precisely thanks to the senses awake.
In the manner of Proust Madeleine, to smell or to perform a task in the garden can take a few years back when one cultivated one’s own garden or did a job related to the land. According to current scientific knowledge, smell is a more evocative sense of memory than others. Unlike other sensory systems, the olfactory system is in direct connection with the amygdala, the part of the brain related to emotions and memory.
Reason 9: To Reconnect with Nature
Finally, gardening is a great way to reconnect with nature and reconnect with the land that we have too often lost in our cities.
If you are a strong advocate of the environment, growing your fruits and vegetables allows you to ban pesticides from your plate and your garden.
You will be able to protect bees and promote biodiversity near you.
Gardening is also an ideal activity to make children aware of nature protection from an early age.
Not only will they be fascinated to see what they have sown, but they will learn to respect the land that feeds us.
Observing and understanding nature is the first step towards becoming an eco-citizen of tomorrow.
Reason 10: Cultivate Your Creativity While Gardening
Planting, weeding, watering, and sowing may seem repetitive and repetitive activities. Yet, they leave a lot of creativity to gardeners. Draw a bed of flowers, vary the types and colors of tomatoes, and arrange spices in a harmonious way … Everyone has the leisure to develop his garden as he sees fit, to choose the plants and flowers he wants to see s to flourish. Not to mention carving a small boxwood heart, squirrel, clover, etc.
The possibilities are multiple. Enough to let the artist sleep inside us, and that we have sometimes broken for lack of time or opportunity.
Gardening is thus giving the opportunity to your creative potential to express yourself.
Reason 11: To Share, Create Cohesion and Acquire New Knowledge
Going gardening inevitably involves asking yourself a few questions (when to plant, water, harvest, are there any tips to limit diseases, etc.) and looking for answers. The budding gardener will inevitably have to seek advice from his neighbor, his family, his friends, forums, shops…
Gardening is about exchanging know-how and experience with others because this activity is all about experimental science. We try for a year, we see the result, and then we adjust the following year. We go from failure to success, from mistakes to successes. And we listen to the elders and the initiates, who know more than us!
Then comes the time of the harvest and the sharing of it with his relatives. We can see it in the big cities where initiatives of shared gardens and workers are flourishing, and new models of urban agriculture: gardening recreates the social bond in our neighborhoods, enough to bring everyone to meet the world and to counteract the anonymity and loneliness of big cities.
Reason 12:
Finally is just to contribute to your well-being, to that of others, to those around you. Go! What are you waiting for? It’s never too late to do gardening! It has never been bad to go gardening! Long live gardening!