My veg patch has blessed me with many things over the years, but perhaps the greatest blessing is the emotional and mental wellbeing it brings. Without really probing why, I’ve long believed that the best balm for a frenzied mind or a harried soul is a day in the vegetable garden.
If I have had a tough week or am simply feeling a little blue, if I am stressed or irritated, nothing restores a calm state more effectively than spending time in the garden. As I write this, my mind wanders back over countless Saturday and Sunday evenings, when tired, sore and mucked up to the eyeballs I am walking up the garden to the house, feeling calm, centered and content. Even reflecting on that feeling now lifts my mood immeasurably.
It seems that the scientific and healthcare communities might finally be catching up with what gardeners have known for millennia – food growing can lead to physical, mental and emotional wellbeing. So much so, that the idea of ‘horticultural therapy’ is starting to gain traction as a proven therapeutic method to engage people with mental health issues and special needs, youth offenders, adult prisoners and people in substance abuse rehabilitation.
The mental health benefits seem to operate on two levels. First of all, growing your own food helps improve physical health, which as we know, has a direct impact on our mental and emotional health.
As your tired back and limbs will testify, food growing is multi-muscular exercise. Run a hoe around your veg patch and you will realize the next day you’ve been using muscles you haven’t used in a while (or ever). Lug a wheelbarrow with soil in it and you’re getting some load bearing exercise that will help fend off osteoporosis. Do some weeding and the associated bending and stretching will improve muscle tone. Spend a half hour turning a compost heap and you get an impressive cardiovascular workout.
It also helps of course that at the same time, you’re out in the fresh air, doing honest-to-goodness work that will help you sleep better and improve your appetite. Sunlight exposure will improve your vitamin D and serotonin exposure. All of these things, are good for your mood.
Your physical and mental health will also benefit from the increased consumption of fresh, nutritious, seasonal fruit and vegetables. But there are additional dietary benefits beyond the food you’ve coaxed out of the veg patch yourself. According to research by Anne C. Bellows and Katherine Brown, “evidence is building that when gardeners produce their own food, their overall food consumption patterns and dietary knowledge improve.” In other words, regardless of how much they grow, food growers make healthier food choices. It also seems likely that eating seasonal food (i.e. greens in spring; water-rich fruits like tomatoes in summer; roots in winter – as nature intended) is also good for our health.
Secondly, there are also direct mental health benefits associated with food growing. A 2011 study published in the Journal of Health Psychology provided the first experimental evidence that gardening can promote relief from acute stress. Thirty gardeners performed a stressful task and were then randomly assigned to 30 minutes of outdoor gardening in their own plot or indoor reading. Gardening and reading each led to decreases in cortisol (stress hormone) during the recovery period, but decreases were significantly stronger in the gardening group. Positive mood was fully restored after gardening, but further deteriorated during reading.
A study by Lowry C.A., et al. (2011) shed further light on this, and confirmed what many little boys already know – playing in dirt actually makes us happy. For this we can be thankful to a strain of bacterium in soil, Mycobacterium vaccae, that has been found to trigger the release of seratonin, which elevates mood, decreases anxiety and boosts immunity. So, if you want to improve your mood put down the trowel and get your hands in the dirt.
There is mounting evidence that exposure to nature of any kind is good for our health for physiological reasons that remain hard for science to explain. At the GIY Gathering last month Alys Fowler spoke of a study in which middle-aged businessmen who hiked for 3 days in a forest saw a 40% increase in their natural killer immune cells. Astonishingly, in contrast, urban walkers saw no change in natural killer immune cell count. In other words – it’s not the walking that counts – it’s where you walk.
On a more emotional level, growing food creates a sense of achievement, empowerment, self-reliance and independence. I’ve often described the first time I grew food successfully as my ‘Cast Away’ moment – from the scene in the Tom Hanks movie when he gets a fire lighting on his desert island for the first time and ends up jumping around in triumph yelling “I created fire!”. It felt that good.
Food growing is both stimulating and grounding at the same time. Stimulating because it’s a wonderful rush of smells, tastes, textures, sounds and sights. Grounding because the mind’s chatter is silenced while you focus on the task at hand (weeding, watering, digging etc). It is a wonderfully meditative activity. There is no instant gratification involved because you just can’t rush nature. Learning to live in tune with the gentle rhythm of the seasons is a formidable antidote to the frenetic pace of modern life.
Finally, I also think that seed sowing (of all the veg grower’s tasks) is an act of profound optimism and hope. We simply stick the seed in the soil and leave the rest to nature’s wisdom, hoping for the best that it will all work out. In learning to live with the myriad of pests, diseases and other calamities that will no doubt befall us during the growing year, we learn to be philosophical – we simply can not control what happens when we leave the veg patch behind and in accepting that powerlessness, we can find peace.
Michael Kelly is author of Trading Paces and Tales from the Home Farm, and founder of GIY.
Source: GIY – The Best Balm for A Harried Soul is A Day in the Garden
