The Benefits of Home Gardening

Gardening bring out the best of you.

What benefit does it bring?

1) Gardening is a great way to beat our stress!

As a human being, we cannot run away from being stressed out especially when we work so hard to achieve our goals in life. Therefore, by doing a home gardening, it can be a way to beat our stress in a healthy way. ​ According to a study conducted by Berg and Custers (2010), they exposed study participants to a stressful activity. After exposing the participants to a stressful activity, they then asked half of the participants to do a reading activity, while the other half to spend some time doing home gardening. ​ After the participants finished doing the task they have given, the researchers than do a test to test the level of the stress hormone cortisol in the body of the participants. The result comes out showed that the participant who did home gardening has recovered from the stress better than the reading group. Not only that, but the gardening group also reported that their moods have returned to a positive state. ​ This is proven that gardening help beats the stress in our body in a healthy way! ​ References: ​ Berg, A.E.V.D., & Custers, M.H.G. (2010). Gardening promotes neuroendocrine and affective restoration from stress. Journal of Health and Psychology, 16(1):3-11. doi.org/10.1177/1359105310365577

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2) Gardening can improve your mood and your mental health.

Nowadays, mental health has become a serious issue as it affects everyone, no matter how old they are or what they do. Therefore, the importance of home gardening is that it can help improve your mood and mental health. This is because, as we do gardening, we can at least feel present and focusing on another thing that does not cause one person to think about their mental health.

According to a study conducted by Gonzalez, Hartig, Patil, Martinsen & Kirkevold (2011), a few participants who has been diagnosed with depression has been assigned to a gardening task for 12 weeks. After 12 weeks, the researchers then measured the mental health such as depression symptom among all the participants. The finding of the result is that all the participant's mental health have significantly improved.

Based on the study that has been conducted, it can be proven that gardening does improve your mental health. Gardening is not just about planting vegetables, fruits and flower, but it is also about you taking care of your mental health in a healthy way.

References:

Gonzalez, M.T., Hartig, T., Patil, G.G., Martinsen, E.W., & Kirkevold, M. (2011). A prospective study of group cohesiveness in therapeutic horticulture for clinical depression. Int J Ment Health Nurs, 20(2):119-29. doi: 10.1111/j.1447-0349.2010.00689.x

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3)Gardening help connecting relationship between one and another

Another benefit of home gardening is that it can help to connect the relationship between one and another. Through home gardening, it actually helps us to have interaction with another person such as with our parents, sibling, neighbour and friends. This is because, from that interaction that we do where most of us spend time together and sharing knowledge about home gardening together, we can make our relationship become closer than before.

For example, according to a study conducted by Lam, Romses and Renwich (2019), they did research that involved participants that are from a school that works as a student from a different age. In the study, they asked the students who participated in gardening to take the picture and shared their experienced about it. Most of the participants shared that the skills that they got from doing so are they learned a sense of personal well-being because they work with different age people. At the same time, they are able to share their opinion and get to know each other well and that it makes them feel good.

Therefore, from the study conducted, we can conclude that another importance of gardening is that it can connect the relationship between one and another no matter how old they are.

References:

Lam, V., Romses, K., & Renwick, K. (2019). Exploring the relationship between school gardens, food literacy and mental well-being in youth using photovoice. Journal of Nutrition, 11(6):1354. doi: 10.3390/nu11061354

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4)Gardening help promoting a healthy lifestyles

Last but not least, another benefit of gardening is that it promotes a healthy lifestyle for everyone. By doing home gardening, we can learn how to plant vegetables and fruit that can be consumed for ourself. Therefore, by consuming vegetables and fruits that we self plant, without we notice, we actually slowly changing our lifestyles into a healthier lifestyle.

Not only that, by doing gardening too, it also helps us to sweat and exercise because we are moving around a lot when doing the activity for our home gardening.

Gardening is a physical activity and there is a range of garden tasks that uses the upper and lower body such as digging, turning compost or raking (Park et al., 2008). The task that we usually do for example as hand weeding, mixing soil, filling containers with soil and transplanting seedlings is also considered as part of physical activity during gardening.

Therefore, by doing home gardening, the benefit that we can get from it not only a healthy lifestyle but also improvement in our physical health.

References:

Park, S.A., Shoemaker, C., & Haub, M. (2008). Can older gardeners meet the physical activity recommendation through gardening?. American Society for Horticultural Science, 18(4), 639–643.