One thing to get straight: Gardening, to us, includes anything from growing herbs on a windowsill and keeping a house plant alive to farming your own allotment with full-on machinery.
Depending on who you ask, people will rattle off anywhere between 5 and 25 benefits that they have experienced from pursuing gardening as a hobby. Serioulsy, some won’t stop talking. Anyway, we've listened carefully, and if you need just a little more convincing, here are our top 5 reason why you should start. Today.
1. It is sustainable. (Or it should be. We will be talking about this more in another post soon.) Obviously sustainability is important to all of us, and by gardening you can make a positive impact on your environment. You can actively increase bio-diversity, help with carbon removal from the air, improving air quality.
2. We are pretty sure it counts as exercise. And since mostly done outside there is all that fresh air, too. And we all know that those things are beneficial for your physical health. Most gardening might gently raise your heart rate, and now and then you find yourself lifting some considerable weights. (Think planters and bags of compost, and do a couple of extra repeats). Key is that you are doing it regularly, and you can't do it sitting down. Don't have an outdoor gardening space? We think it's totally fine to take your houseplants for a walk now and then.
3. It can improve your mental health. From mindfulness to the antidepressant effects of soil microbes, many studies show that gardeners benefit in many ways.
4. It can be as social as you want it to be. You can retreat and have time to yourself, you can do it with the children, or a partner. Or not. You can join a gardening club, or a guerrilla street planting force. You can use a glut of produce to reach out to neighbours, swap seeds with friends. It can even be social media social. Next time the ground is too frozen to be dug up, check out some of those #gardeningideas or #gardeninglove hashtags to get your fix.
5. All that free food. Ok, maybe not entirely free once you count the seeds and the work. But then again, that wasn't work, was it? That was free exercise, and free therapy, and you (hopefully) get organic produce out of it. We still talk about that first batch of potatoes we grew back in 2010. No potato ever since has tasted as good as those.
Need any more reasons? We didn’t think so. Now get out there. And if you need any equipment to get started, check out our collection of nifty hand tools.