Home Gardening For Stress Relief
Become A Weekend Gardener
If you need an escape from the concrete jungle you live in, creating a relaxation garden right in the premises of your home will certainly be a feasible idea.
Planting your own flowers or vegetable, designing your own garden; these are the joys of gardening that can certainly be a wonderful stress-reliever. Even those who are around you can also benefit from the sight of vibrant color of greenery and bright floral colors can perk anybody up.
However, you may feel hesitant about this idea, especially if you have never tried home gardening. Gardening is certainly not as difficult as it may seem. While there are many things which you should know, you can accumulate the knowledge along the way as you begin to tend to your garden. With some elementary knowledge on how to create and maintain a home garden you will certainly be able to have a beautiful garden, and in the process feel more relaxed and stress-free.
One of the ways to start the garden of your dreams is to become a weekend gardener. You can develop a plan that really works for you in a time friendly way.
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Simply stated, it’s about time. Time that you spend tending your garden. Even though the demands of your contemporary lifestyle may make great demands on you, this doesn’t mean you can’t also have this delightful pastime of a relaxation garden. You want your garden to bring pleasure, satisfaction, and a sense of calmness, — not provoke anxiety or stress because there just isn’t enough time to plant the petunias, tie up the tomatoes or prune the privet before sundown.
If you’re trying to ‘beat the clock’ you will find yourself stressed and incapable of enjoying the wonderful world of gardening. It’s all about healthful relaxation with the time you have to devote to your garden Believe me you can have a home garden and enjoy it too. You need not be a slave to even a large garden. When carefully plan your garden filled with trouble free plants you will discover the time to b-r-e-a-t-h-e in the beauty; you can let this kind of garden practically take care of itself.
As a weekend gardener, not only are you becoming fit, but you’re doing it with nature, in the fresh air and there are real manifestations of your achievements, too. Best of all, you get to see the results of your toil in the soil.
The key is making sure the tasks aren’t overly strenuous or time consuming. Good weekend gardening can be the perfect antidote to the stress all around us in this new millennium. When you plan a low-maintenance garden you’ll discover you have time to enjoy some old-fashioned relaxation in your weekend.
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If you follow a solid plan for a low-maintenance garden, you’ll find the actual time needed to grow and care for it to be remarkably ‘time-friendly’. You may end up feeling good about yourself and have a sense of gratification and overall calmness. The key is making a garden you can take pride and great pleasure in and do it with the time that’s reasonably available to you.
How Can I Start a Home Gardening Without Any Knowledge?
Gardening is one of the popular hobbies tried out by many people these days especially if they’re looking for the best solutions in beautifying their homes and finding a way just to relax and enjoy nature. If this is your first time to try gardening for this purpose, you may be overwhelmed with the thought of doing this procedure. Having no knowledge about it will make you feel a little intimidated by the things you must do to achieve a beautiful garden. Luckily, you will find that gardening can be very simple thing to do if you have the right information.
Where to begin?
Start With Your Weekend Gardening Goals
First and foremost, you should begin by figuring out your gardening goals- how you’d like to use the garden in your property. Begin by asking yourself the following questions:
- Do you want to use your garden primarily to provide pesticide-free food for your family?
- Are you interested in cultivating flowers?
- Perhaps you wish to do both; flower gardens and a vegetable garden?
- Ask yourself what kind of features you’d like to have, like a formal herb garden, a wildflower region, a strawberry patch.
Take your dreams, your goals and take some notes. Put them in order and this becomes important in helping you determine the size and effort in any gardening needs.
Once you have completed your lists of goals and wishes you can begin to really plan your home garden. You may have to make some hard choices. Be realistic.
For example, an herb garden with brick paths and a sundial instead becomes a more realistic rock garden and culinary herb garden. A vegetable garden; to a salad garden. Keep it small and simple.
Remember, you only have a limited amount of time to develop your dreams, you want to invest the most effort in maintaining those areas that hold the most interest to you.
Looking For Easy Solutions
The real key to easy-care landscaping is to begin with plants that are suited to your climate and to the particular exposure, soil, moisture, and other conditions in which you are planning to grow them. These are what I like to call “happy” plants. They grow better because they find their environment ideally suited to them. You’ll be happier too, because you have fewer problems with them.
Going ‘native’ in the garden is a good idea. Creating a garden ecosystem together with plants that are in their natural environment makes total sense. Plants grow naturally in many different habitats— deserts, swamps, bogs, woods, meadows, and rocky screes. Perennial borders, foundation plantings, and open lawns hardly duplicate such natural settings and many times offer plants far from their own ideal. Therefore, natural settings should be considered as well as native plants when constructing your ideal garden.
It is also important to scale down your wish list to keep high-maintenance areas to a small scale. Instead of planting an orchard, plant a row of low-maintenance blueberries. Rather than planting a large formal garden of herbs, which would require a lot of preparation and tending, why not compromise? Confine particular herbs you really want in clay planters.
Keep in mind, that the goal is to decrease your stress and feel a sense of joy and satisfaction by creating a beautiful home garden. Remember to reduce the amount of your property that you will actively cultivate. Keeping your garden on a smaller scale conserves water and reduces tending and maintenance. Don’t feel like every given inch of property must be developed. The goal here is to feel less stress and anxiety.
Think About your Budget
Do not forget your budget. When you are in the process of making up a plan for your gardening, you should not forget to include your budget in it. You should not forget to consider how much you would be willing to spend for your plants, in accordance to your overall monthly budget. Aside from that, you should also consider that there may be times in the year, when your garden would require more from you. By doing this, you can properly determine the kind of size you want your garden to have.
Plan the Layout of Your Garden
To make your garden look attractive, you should plan a garden lay out well. To do that, it is best if you come up with a sketch that represents your garden. When you do that, you would be able to properly determine what goes where, which can make your garden not just attractive, but easy to work with as well.
Remember, you only have a limited amount of time to develop your dreams, you want to invest the most effort in maintaining those areas that hold the most interest to you. A gardening plan can help you do that.
Prepare the Area for Plants
After you made your gardening plan, the next best thing to do is to prepare the space where you want them situated. Find the right location that ensures that your plants will have constant supply of sunlight, so that they will survive and produce a lot of flowers, fruits or vegetables for you.
Next clean the area and get rid of stuff that could possibly harm them or you. It is also important to prepare the soil first. Dig and loosen the garden soil as deeply as possible, what you want to do is have a loose, deep, fertile soil that water and roots penetrate easily. This called double digging.
So put the time and effort into double digging that soil fully first, especially if you have soil that isn’t too good to begin with, like that which is light and sandy, heavy and high in clay, or compacted from being walked or driven on. The efforts you make now will payoff later.
Now to get to do this effectively you need to have the necessary gardening tools.
Don’t Take Your Tools for Granted
As a fellow weekender you’ll be happy to know there are many tools and techniques you can employ to save hours of labor and virtually assure you experience little or no frustration. It’s important not to take your tools for granted and do invest in the best you can afford. The better made tools last longer and will ultimately save you money.
If this is your first time to venture into gardening, then purchasing the tools should be done soon. You can do this by visiting a hardware store near your home. There are a lot of tools that you can use for gardening. Just go with the most basic kinds, and don’t forget to consider your strength when you are selecting the kind of sizes of the tools that you want to have.
Ordering the seeds for your Garden
Once you have the tools, you should begin ordering the seeds that you need for your garden. There are a lot of reputable suppliers when it comes to this. To find out more about them, you can search for them through the internet. You can also ask some of your friends for their recommendations. It is best to go with suppliers that pack their seeds very well. On top of that, they should also provide you a guarantee that the seeds are fresh and are of high quality.
Advice for Creating your weekend Garden
If you need advice on creating your home garden you can meet some other gardeners, who can be found in local garden clubs and community gardens in just about any town or city.
Also, for some great gardening tips, just start up a conversation with one of the gardeners next time you are passing by a community garden. Most will love to share their gardening savvy, and that’s a really nice way to start.
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By now your garden space is ready, you have the tools you need, and the seeds you want to plant. Gardening experts recommended you plant your seeds in small pots indoors if you want to optimize their survival. Keep in mind that you can also obtain special seed-starter soil for this. To make it easier for you in transferring them outside later, you can make use of thin plastic pots. Remember to soak the soil thoroughly and fertilize if necessary. Once you have your young plants follow your garden plan and transfer them to the place that will soon become your garden of peace and tranquility.
Why Gardening Works to Relieve Stress
Gardening can certainly relieve stress and make you feel more relaxed and calmer as you become one with nature. It has mental and physical health benefits. There was an English poet called Alfred Austin, that wrote “The glory of gardening: hands in the dirt, head in the sun, heart with nature. To nurture a garden is to feed not just on the body, but the soul.” Gardening does have positive holistic affects.
There is also growing evidence to support the fact that gardening reduces stress. In a recent study conducted in the Netherlands, suggests that gardening can have stress relieving effects more so that other relaxing activity such as reading.
They asked thirty gardeners to perform a stressful task and were then randomly assigned to 30 minutes of outdoor gardening or indoor reading.
They found that there were significantly lower levels of cortisol in gardening group and were in more positive mood that those that read. These findings showed that gardening can promote stress relief.
When you do your weekend gardening it can help to reverse the effects of stress. There are varies benefits when you have your weekend garden.
Physical Benefits:
When you are gardening you are doing activities such as raking, weeding, digging, planting, and harvesting help to provide tension release from our bodies. This activity is a form of exercise that requires strength or stretching, and especially beneficial for people who are older or have some other disabilities.
Nutritional Benefits
When you plant you own fruits and vegetables you will be eating fresh food that taste better and is the healthiest that you can eat. In fact, people who eat what they grow are usually healthier than those who don’t.
Sunlight Benefits:
Gardening exposes you to the sunlight and the fresh air. Sunlight also provides Vitamin D, which is also good for your health. It increases your calcium levels which is beneficial to your bones and immune system. The sunlight also helps to improve your mood by increasing serotonin levels that also help increase focus, creativity and even improve depression symptoms.
Improve Brain Health
Some research studies conducted in 2006 suggest that gardening could lower risk of dementia by 36 percent. Researchers tracked more than 2,800 people over the age of 60 years who gardened regularly and concluded that physical and mental activity utilized in gardening decreased the risk of dementia more so than non-gardeners.
Gardening has a positive influence on the mind and body. A garden can be a therapeutic experience. The sight, smells and sounds of a garden can promote relaxation and reduce stress.
Meditative Qualities:
When you spend many hours in the garden doing various tasks it can provide a meditative quality. It offers a quiet place that you can reflect or contemplate that allows you to shift the focus away from yourself to something that is very nurturing. You will feel more relaxed after gardening because you gave your brain a break from the daily stress and have found clarity and peace of mind.
Being a weekend gardener doesn’t need to be stressful if you have a gardening plan, plant the things you love. If enjoy flowers grow them, if you want to eat healthier then grow organic vegetables. The important thing is that you are creating a garden for enjoyment, satisfaction, and peace of mind.
