The Healing and Meditative Value of Gardening

Gardening is a very meditative pastime, at least for me.

I'm not talking about "irritating yardwork" like mowing the lawn when it's hot, or trimming thorny hedges. I'm talking about growing things, particularly of the food variety.

The other thing about gardening is that it tends to be an incremental effort.

You go out in the garden and you do something but you can't necessarily tell that there's a difference... nothing you're looking at seems like it changed. In fact, there are many occasions on which I keep working and working, and you wonder if anything is really changing. It is not until a friend comes to visit and says "oh my goodness, look at all the things you've done with your garden" that you really become aware that all that work did amount to something.

Our garden has been a work in progress for over ten years.

Seems like we go out and work on something almost every day, starting around the middle of March and then we keep going until the beginning of November, sometimes later. We're blessed with a pretty long growing season around here... some years the first frost doesn't happen until after Christmas!

One of our ongoing projects revolves around the simple idea of "less lawn, more growspace."

At times we look at each other and it seems like we're not gaining on it, at all... we have been "working on" four more raised beds in the side yard for the past four years. So far the only thing I have really managed to get going is an expanded potato patch.

In many ways, gardening offers an interesting counterpoint to our fast moving lifestyles today. It's slow; sometimes very slow!

If you look at gardening throughout history, many of the Great Gardens of the world have been there for hundreds of years and they are something that people keep working on and working on through multiple generations. It is a good way to teach yourself a lot of patience.

Looking at carrots... from the ground UP!

Of course, gardening often offers its own set of surprises. Sometimes we grow something extremely well for a couple of years, and then the plants... even though we practice "crop rotation" suddenly turn out very substandard, the next year.

This year, we're having a bumper crop of snow peas, and some of the plants have grown to eight feet tall! Previously, I can remember seeing snow peas getting much beyond chest height... much like they were for the past couple of years.

Maybe we should allow ourselves to "graduate" to the next level of gardening and get into the whole "soil testing" aspect of things. Sounds terribly "serious," as we have pretty much always done things entirely "by feel."

Fresh from the garden is hard to beat!

Anyway, part of my point here is that the garden is not just about growing food, it's also about better mental health in a rather hectic and somewhat stressful world.

Whenever I get frustrated with something — or start feeling anxious about our ability to "afford" life — a trip to the garden tends to calm my anxious arse down again... makes me hope people don't lose touch with the earth, as we increasingly retreat inside our digital and virtual worlds.

Makes me feel quite grateful that our oldest son is teaching the grandkids about being outside and growing things, rather than just allowing them to live inside the technological world, 24/7.

Gives me a small glimmer of hope for the future...

Tomorrow I need to harvest and freeze another batch of snow peas... this is the first year we have had so many that we aren't just eating them all. Thankfully, they freeze quite well, and will be a welcome addition to stir fry's this winter... when they are $5/pound at the shops, if you can get them at all!

Thanks for stopping by, and have a great Friday!

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Created at 2024-08-01 01:42 PDT
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