Gardening is indeed a lot of fun. Who wouldn’t want to get their hands dirty in the mud and play around with the water pipe? It can be a great weekend activity with friends and family. Gardening brings with it a plethora of health benefits. Here are some of them:

Physical activity
It might just be all the exercise you need! It is both a pleasurable and goal-oriented activity, and people would want to stick to it instead of letting go or not being consistent at it. Any other form of workout has a high risk of inconsistency but certainly not gardening. However, if you are looking at a good level of cardiovascular fitness, you really have to haul your wheelbarrow and not just stick to moving, shoveling or pruning. Gardening activities like digging, planting, weeding and other repetitive tasks do give you low-impact exercise, which is still a great achievement. If you have elderly people at home or even those who have a chronic disease, gardening could help them with good blood flow. This is a major health benefit of gardening.

Antidepressants
Gardening does wonders for people with a mental illness. Study shows that people with such illness are advised to get their hands on horticultural therapy – a garden which has a combination of fruits and vegetables and scented plants to nourish their senses. The visual aesthetic appeal, the scent of fresh flowers and fruits, the nutritional benefits, all of it can benefit people with a mental illness. It can help foster a sense of confidence and increase their self-esteem.

Vitamin D
Gardening requires you to stay out in the Sun which means that you get your dose of vitamin D. Vitamin D, which is found very less in any food, is instrumental in preventing a plethora of chronic illnesses. Rheumatoid arthritis, for example, is an illness out of lack of vitamin D. Thus, this is a very important health benefit of gardening.

Hand strength
As one gets older, the strength in the hands may gradually reduce, and this certainly limits a lot of activities. When one does gardening, it keeps their muscles agile and vigorous, thereby widening the range of activity that one is capable of doing.

Healthier food
A person who grows their own food tends to eat healthy, for they are quite aware of the labor of hard work and the nutritional benefits of their garden. More often than not, their home is filled with fresh fruits and vegetables instead of any other kind of food/snack.

Brain nutrition
A lot of research has proved that everyday gardening reduces the risk of dementia in elderly people by 36%. This is because gardening involves several critical functions like learning, solving problems, and sensory awareness to name a few.

To summarise, gardening does have a lot of positive effects both on the person, their family, their immediate environment, and the planet as a whole. There is a lot of sense of belonging that comes out of gardening. This can certainly help to develop an awareness of oneself.