Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Good for the mind and body
Chances are that you garden because you enjoy it — whether it’s the beautiful colors, textures and fragrance of flowers, the delicious taste of your own home-grown vegetables, or even the savings over buying produce at the grocery store. Perhaps you simply enjoy having a reason to be outdoors, or maybe gardening is a family project and you appreciate the time to work together on a common goal.
That’s more than enough to recommend gardening as a pastime, but there’s more. Several years ago I wrote an article for The American Gardener on the health benefits of gardening. I’d always known that I felt better for being outside working in the yard and garden, but my research told me even more: Gardening may be the perfect exercise.
First off, gardening burns calories. How many? “Active” gardening — tasks like weeding/cultivating, raking, planting seedlings, bagging leaves, trimming with a manual cutter — burns 150 to 180 calories in half an hour, equivalent to doubles tennis, playing golf (if carrying your clubs), and walking at a rate of four miles an hour.
More strenuous tasks such as digging, tilling and walking with a mower, burn 210 to 240 calories in half an hour. Even modest activities, like walking while applying fertilizer, burn 85 calories in that amount of time.
Beyond burning calories, gardening is good for the entire body. While gardening, you’re reaching, stretching, bending, lifting and pulling, using both large and small muscles. It’s especially beneficial if you rotate tasks, thus avoiding over-stressing any particular part of your body. Do avoid overdoing it, especially on hot, humid days. Take breaks as you need them, and remember to drink plenty of water.
Another benefit is that exposing skin to sunlight causes the skin to produce the Vitamin D it needs to keep bones strong. Not
much exposure is needed; just a few minutes several times a week. Overexposure can lead to skin damage and skin cancer.
It gets even better. Reports from the Surgeon General and the National Institutes of Health tell us that there are other, serious benefits from achieving 30 minutes of moderate exercise twice a week. Exercise:
• helps prevent heart disease, diabetes, colon cancer, high blood pressure, obesity, and osteoporosis.
• helps manage existing conditions, e.g., high blood pressure, diabetes, and high cholesterol.
• improves balance, and reduces the risk of falling.
• enhances flexibility, and helps with arthritis symptoms.
Those are just the physical benefits of gardening exercise can provide. There is now research to explain what gardeners have known for a long time: Exercise makes you feel better emotionally, reducing stress, improving sleep, and counteracting depression.
A recent post at fix.com talks about gardening as a “wonder drug.” The article references a June 2013 CBS news report that showed 13 percent of Americans taking antidepressants at that time. Mycobacterium vaccae, a bacterium found in soils almost everywhere, stimulates production of norepinephrine and serotonin, just like antidepressant drugs do. In addition to the benefits of the M. vaccae, gardening increases neurotrophins throughout the entire brain, increasing mental health. It also reduces cortisol, which helps reduce stress.
More and more people are turning to the practice of meditation as a way of turning off the constant chatter of the mind and de-stressing. Some gardening tasks have a meditative quality to them: picking off spent blossoms, hand weeding, and pruning shrubs — these all involve steady, repetitive movement.
Research and science aside, I think that gardeners have long known that despite the work, gardening is fun. What more proof do we need of its benefit than the fact that we enjoy it? Of course, it doesn’t hurt to know that gardening is really good for us — that’s just more to feel good about!
Pam Baxter is an avid organic vegetable gardener who lives in Kimberton. Direct e-mail to pcbaxter@verizon.net, or send mail to P.O. Box 80, Kimberton, PA 19442.