5 Ways Sustainable Gardening Keeps You Healthy

Gardening is a wonderful hobby that provides many health benefits for you and the world. People can grow sustainability-focused gardens that yield enough to feed themselves and their families year-round. Others have so much harvest leftover that they’re able to donate their food to grateful non-profits, friends, and family. Even more, people find a passion for gardening that turns into a profitable business for them. Aside from the impact your gardening has on your local community and the natural ecosystems, it dramatically impacts your health too. Studies have even shown the benefits of gardening for people with dementia. 

No matter where you fall on the spectrum of gardeners – novice to master – your health will be improved as you grow in your craft (pun intended). Let’s look at how you can get healthy through your gardening hobby.

Use Gardening to Workout Instead of Using a Gym

Sure, you may spend a good deal of time kneeling on your kneeling pad, but you’re also up and down for much of the time you’re gardening. Strength training is an excellent form of exercise, and between cutting bins and bags of mulch, you’re doing a lot of heavy lifting. Who needs squats when you’ve got a garden to tend to? The physical aspect of gardening should not be overlooked when it comes to how it keeps you healthy. 

Eat Sustainable Fresh Produce When You Garden

There’s nothing like seeing your crops start budding, the excitement you feel each morning as you head outside to check on your fresh fruits and vegetables and where they’re at in their growth process. When it’s finally time to harvest after all your hard work, you get to experience firsthand just how much better a freshly plucked strawberry tastes than one purchased from a grocery store. 

Even if you’re shopping at local farmers markets, you’re still getting fresher at home. While it’s important to supplement a healthy diet with super supplements and exercise, you’re eating the freshest and highest quality of food – a straight path to better health. 

Passion to Profit 

One aspect of health that can’t be ignored is financial health. If you are producing enough crops that you and your family have more than you know what to do with, you can turn your passion for gardening into serious profits. You may not know where to start, so your best bet is to visit local grocers and natural food stores to share samples of what you’re growing. These smaller operations are more likely to take a chance on a local gardener. 

Maybe you make delicious kraut with the vegetables and herbs you grow – consider jarring them and offering samples of those too. You’d be amazed how quickly tiny, natural foods stores can turn your famous apple butter or sauerkraut into a local hit. By selling locally, you also reduce your carbon footprint because you aren’t shipping products nationwide.

The point is to turn your passion into financial freedom. Don’t be discouraged and think it couldn’t happen – because it happens every day.

The Great Outdoors 

Spending time outdoors gives us plenty of exposure to something that most people are lacking – Vitamin D. We can get our daily dose of Vitamin D by spending just fifteen to twenty minutes outside in the sunshine. If you’re serious about your gardens, you’re outdoors much longer than that. Vitamin D is responsible for many vital parts of our health – immune function, reducing mood and depression, staving off cancer, and more. Because Vitamin D is lacking in most foods we eat, this time outside is incredibly healthy. Additionally, breathing in the fresh air outdoors is much better for you than breathing recycled air indoors. 

Making the World More Beautiful 

Not everything you grow in your garden is necessarily consumable. By growing native flowers and trees in your yard, you’re giving more food to the essential pollinators of the world. You’re adding color and beauty to your neighborhood and yard. By planting flowers, shrubs, trees, and more, you make the world more beautiful – and that’s priceless. Again, growing flowers could turn into a lucrative business for you as well if you’re so inclined to sell bouquets. Your prized peonies may bring in a pretty penny if you know where to pitch them.

Gardening can be a side hobby for some and a full-time project for others. Whether you find gardening in your childhood or after retirement, it’s never too late to experience the many health benefits that this skill set brings. Now get growing!