Gardening for your mental health

In this week of mental health awareness, I’d like to shout from the rooftops, that gardening is good for your general health but especially for your mental health.

I’m a person that doesn’t find it easy to relax, not my body or my mind, but in the garden I am truly zen. It’s actually quite difficult to describe quite how it makes me feel, but mainly calm, happy and that nothing else really matters.

I’m not sure if it’s being outside in the fresh air; or the process of tending living things; or the company of wildlife that a garden brings; or the constant planning and looking forward to what’s coming next. I once heard someone say that, “to be a gardener, is to be an optimist”, believing that you will still be here next season to reap the rewards of what you are doing today.

Whatever the secret, if you have any outdoor space gardening can be a cheap and easy way to benefit your mental health.

I’m Not A Gardener

If you’re thinking, ‘well I’m not a gardener’, how do you know?

I had no idea that there was a passionate gardener inside me, despite my dad being in seventh heaven when he was gardening. Sadly he didn’t live long enough to see me grow up and take on his passion, and especially sad, he wasn’t able to pass on his gardening knowledge.

My eureka moment happened when I got my first small garden patch, I planted some ugly little crocus bulbs in the autumn. The following spring, when these beautiful mauve flowers appeared, it was like magic and I was hooked!

I started watching Gardener’s World, visiting gardens and much to the garden apprentice’s (husband’s) horror, frequenting garden centres. Buying plants or packets of seed’s really feels like retail therapy, but planting and sowing them truly is relaxation therapy.

But the best tip of all, talk to other gardeners. They’ll be dying to give you all the advise you could ever want and a bonus is, they will want to give you free plants.

Two ways, Gardening is good for your figure

The first way is pretty obvious, we all know exercise is good for us and gardening involves plenty of that.

Digging is the thing everyone thinks of, but Charles Dowding’s ‘no dig’ approach to gardening has not only been shown to work and actually seems to work better than the old technique of deep digging. It also makes gardening much easier which should encourage more people to have a go.

The main exercise comes from pottering, every gardeners favourite pastime. You’ll always find something to do when pottering. An odd weed to pull up; a bit of watering; and, “oh, that plant would look much better over there, I’ll just get my trowel and move it”.

The second way is missing mealtimes, unless you garden with cat’s!

What I noticed when I first started gardening and is still the case now, is that, when I’m gardening time has no meaning. I get so engrossed in what I’m doing, I loose all sense of it.

Eventuality either I start to feel hungry or much more likely the cats get hungry and after small hints they try to trip me up. I often explained to them that their tactics are flawed. If they trip me up and I break my neck, they won’t get fed at all!

The Rewards of Growing Your Own

Growing flowers and creating a lovely space to sit in was rewarding enough for me, but once I’d grown and tasted my first tomato, I discovered the rewards of growing your own. This sparked a desire to grow much more of our own food.

The garden apprentice was already keen on the idea of growing more food. As a child he was taken to visit an oasis of a garden where his great uncle was the head gardener. The 18′ high, walled kitchen garden, with espalier apricots ripening in the sun, left a lasting impression on him.

We set about growing more food in our relatively small garden, using pots for strawberries and Granny’s old dolly tub with wigwamed canes for runner beans. It’s amazing how much you can grow in a small space.

We had two old walls in the garden which were falling down, so we re-built them and dreamed of the day that we might have a proper walled garden.

Dream Come True – Our Oasis

We finally moved house, or garden as I usually say, in 2013 and set about the mammoth task of, wall building, sieving stony soil and finally planting. It took a good few years, and we’re not quite finished yet! Strangely enough, even all that ‘very’ hard work landscaping was enjoyable and relaxing in a funny sort of way.

A big part of the garden is made over to food growing, and this is the part of the garden we created first. Despite us only having 6′ walls we manage to grow quite a lot of fruit on them.

Gardening Through a Pandemic

The calming mental health benefits of the garden were never so appreciated as in lockdown. I have to admit to some panic buying, but you could stick your loo rolls it was compost that I wanted. Although I do always save my loo role holders to grow peas in.

It’s hard to remember now the overwhelming fear that the pandemic brought. The idea of someone you love catching and dying from covid was terrifying indeed. On top of that were the financial worries and fears of food shortages.

This last worry was at least something I felt I had some control over and I set about growing more than usual. It was something to focus on and whilst I was gardening I wasn’t thinking – a very dangerous pass time!

I did try to encourage others to start gardening in lockdown, sending seeds out. Trying to spread the word that gardening needn’t be complicated. All you really need is some sort of pot, an old plastic food container will do, some compost or soil, and some seeds. All the rest is just unnecessary fluff that we like to buy but don’t really need.

All the gardening books and TV programmes can sometimes make people think gardening is complicated and difficult and it isn’t. If you think about it, plants grow happily on their own without any help from us, they throw out seeds into the air, which land and germinate. All we really do is get them to grow where we want them, easy!

If you suffer with your mental health there are more and more charities out there offering help through gardening.

Mind – I think Mind is the most well known mental health charity and even they now extoll the virtues of gardening as a therapy.

RHS – No one knows more about gardening than the Royal Horticultural Society, and they now offer a great deal of advise on gardening therapy, including a great scheme at The Bridgwater garden in Salford.

Thrive – Has been doing this for over 40yrs, unfortunately they are only in London, Reading & Birmingham.

Mental Health Awareness Week – And of course, this is the charity that started 21yrs ago to create a platform to bring mental health awareness to us all. If we are talking about it, we are thinking about it, and we can start to be aware of what helps us feel better.

Stay safe & happy gardening.