Gardening offers a wide range of benefits including:
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Nutritious Food & Improved Diet: Freshly harvested vegetables have more nutrients than those that have traveled miles and days/weeks to get to the store. Your tastebuds know it too: a homegrown heirloom tomato always tastes way more amazing and complex than any store-bought tomatoes, especially when fresh-picked and still warm from the sun. When you garden, you can grow specialty peppers that are packed with flavor that you'd never find at the store, and you can grow varieties that you love.
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Better Tasting Food! Homegrown food just tastes better. Fully ripened red chiles and red jalapenos, while tastier and more nutritious than their unripe green counterparts, are very perishable, so you won't find them at the grocery store. Nothing beats fresh, crispy Shishito peppers just out of the garden! Gardens allow you to be able to enjoy fresh lettuce, herbs and tons of other veggies. Eating seasonally when the flavors are at their peak is not just about nutrition, it's about the "wow that tastes so good" factor!
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Exercise & Fitness: Studies have shown that people who garden stay fit and can live longer due to the fact that gardening improves muscle strength, flexibility, and balance. You're getting great exercise when you turn the compost, or squat down to reach and harvest peppers, or prepare the beds and transplant seedlings into the garden. You may have heard of Blue Zones, where residents often live longer and healthier lives partly because gardening and movement is a cornerstone of their, daily routine. Gardening = movement. Instead of intense exercise, our gardens instead beckon us to enjoy constant, daily activity, including bending, stretching, harvesting, weeding, and watering. Because gardening involves a wide variety of movements, including walking, squatting, bending, lifting, and reaching – it contributes to overall physical fitness and flexibility. Added bonus: this variety of movement also strengthens balance to help prevent falls!
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Stronger Bones: Weight-bearing activities like digging, or hauling a wheelbarrow can increase bone density and help prevent osteoporosis. These activities force you to work against gravity, which strengthens your bones by stimulating extra deposits of calcium and bone-forming cells into action, resulting in stronger, denser bones.
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Muscle-Strengthening: Gardening strengthens your muscles by engaging mulscle groups in your arms, legs, shoulders, back and abdomen. As muscles pull on bones, they also strengthen your bones. Harvesting veggies and carrying them is great for your muscles!
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Stress Reduction: You'll quickly find that when you're in the garden, most of the worries of life tend to fade away and you can focus on the project at hand. It's quite peaceful. Gardens also encourage us to take a moment to watch a bumblebee buzz around and pollinator tomato blossoms, or to see a Swallowtail enjoying the blooming dill, or listen to the goldfinches as they enjoy the seeds of Echinacea. Gardening and observing lowers cortisol levels and acts as a meditative, calming practice – a perfect way to counteract the information overload, constant headlines, and financial worries of our modern lives. Princeton researchers recently found that gardening at home had a similar effect on people's emotional well-being (aka happiness) as biking, walking or dining out – it just makes you happy!
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Avoid Pesticides: Growing your own food allows you to avoid pesticides in your food. Even organic farms can use organic pesticides, so when you grow at home you don't have to use any pesticides at all. We like to grow lots of flowers, herbs and other companion plants that help balance the ecosystem by attracting pest-eating beneficial insects and pollinators to the garden. By growing organically, you can create a safe oasis that is home to pollinators, birds, beneficial insects and other wildlife. You can also grow native plants like Echinacea to really boost wildlife support and habitat.
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Purpose, and a sense of Accomplishment: To harvest and eat our homegrown abundance gives us a huge sense of accomplishment! Gardening offers a strong sense of purpose, and keeps people moving at all ages. Knowing we have plants to take care of, seeds to plant, and lots of other gardening tasks to do gives us purpose and hope every day. Not to mention the satisfaction of planting a row of peas, or transplanting your peppers into the garden. It's very rewarding to check on them daily and watch them grow.
Are you new or getting started with gardening? Check out our Food Garden gift set which is 50% off for a limited time, and includes 20 of the easiest to grow vegetable seeds so you can experience success this season!
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Gardens inspire you to become a Home Chef! When you have fresh ingredients in your garden, you'll tend to cook more and search for or come up with clever recipes to use the abundance. You can grow your favorite unusual and tasty varieties of veggies that you can't find at the market. You can also try growing new varieties every season – for example Sandia Seed has over 100 peppers of the world that you can grow from seeds in your garden! It's is satisfying and rewarding to know you have peppers to pick, or sage and chives to throw onto your breakfast potatoes, or a basket-full of cucumbers to pickle, or green onions to put on top of smothered burritos or in pico-de-gallo. When you sprinkle fresh herbs and use fresh veggies in your cooking, you'll feel like you're a chef and everyone's tastebuds will thank you for the delicious homegrown food.
This year is a great year to get into gardening and growing your own food!
Happy growing!
