Having a vegetable garden can improve your health. A beautiful flower garden can improve the look of your home. But just planting and maintaining a garden can improve your prospects. After a few hours of planting, weeding, or pruning, most people have more positive attitudes, even though they may have some muscle aches and pains or may feel tired. After all, it’s well tired. A tired person who has achieved something. A tired person born out of contact with nature.
The benefits of spending time outdoors in a garden are many.
Stress melts away in a garden. Whether it’s the fresh air, or the sun, or the chirping of birds, or just physical activity, studies have shown that gardening is one of the best ways to reduce stress. Go into a garden feeling a little tense, and a few taps on a weed or staples on an unruly shrub will take care of any minor aggression you feel. Don’t take it out on your family, in other words take it out on a weed.
Gardening can help overcome loneliness. Gardening can be therapeutic, especially now that so many of us work from home and need to avoid socializing in order to reduce the spread of COVID-19. When you’re outside in the fresh air, stretching those winter-stiffened muscles behind a rake or shovel, and reconnecting with other gardening neighbors, albeit from a safe 6 feet above the fence, you may find that you are not alone.
Gardening makes us feel better because it can release certain “happy” chemicals in our bodies, including serotonin. Serotonin is a neural chemical that our body produces and that affects our body’s mood, anxiety, digestion, cognition, and many other important functions. Light exposure is widely used to treat seasonal depression, but it appears to affect other types of depression as well. Being outside in the light even on a cloudy day can serve to increase serotonin levels in our bodies.
Exercise can also increase serotonin. And researchers have discovered that Mycobacterium vacae, a bacteria living in the soil, also triggers the release of serotonin. When we turn soil in a garden, we breathe in M. inoculum spores, which studies have shown can improve mood and cognition in mice.
Remember to start a garden this year. Big or small, in the ground or in a couple of pots, it’s hard to hold negative thoughts for too long when you’re touching the earth and promoting new life.
The above column was submitted by Amy Aldenderfer, Hardin County Extension Horticultural Agent. She can be reached at 270-765-4121, extension. 114, amy.aldenderfer@uky.edu or on the Internet at hardin.ca.uky.edu.
