1. If you have been feeling like you have lost touch with life and the natural world and feel like time is just slipping by, gardening will bring you back to earth and make you check back in.
Seeing the small seeds and flowers that create the food and things I have always enjoyed but never knew the life cycles of is an absolute delight. Caring for something that takes time and patience but also has me checking the skies and weather makes me tune in to the outside world and time.
It reminds me of playing outside when I was a child when it was your job to make shapes out of clouds and jump into puddles and dig in the dirt. I love seeing crops I had largely only ever seen in the store, like onions and herbs flowering. Broccoli and cauliflower flowering!
Caring for and growing things I could enjoy and even harvest to eat offered a sense of accomplishment and connection to the world. I loved tuning more carefully into the seasons again outside of calender events. It was also empowering. Environmental sciences always fascinated me, so the idea of gaining some of my own independence and “sticking it to Big Agriculture” feels freeing. It also makes you much more appreciative and aware of our global food market and how much work goes in off the backs of other people around the world just so food can be enjoyed cheaply elsewhere.
Gardening is such a beautiful and complexly simple thing. It is a very human experience. 10/10 would recommend.
2. For me I guess it’s genetic. I grew up watching my mom, my closest aunt and my grandfather tend their garden. I live in the city but recently moved in a small flat with a terrace. I bought pots and flowers before buying new furnitures. I think there’s no equal feeling to the one you have when you harvest fruits or vegetables you patiently cared, or when the flowers you planted finally blossom.
3. First, it helps me to save some money. I mean, I haven’t bought a kg. of tomatoes/peppers/beans/avocados/mangoes/oregano/lemons/coriander/coconuts in ages. Plus it feels good to know that what you eat comes from: your own efforts+nature’s magic.
Second, it’s relaxing. Listening the sound of the wind through the trees; feeling the grass and the land under my bare feet, the smell of everything, and that relaxing green color everywhere.
Third, it helps me to think and meditate, to be conscious about some things, you know, thinking about life and the world while watering, or trying to stay quiet in silence while plucking weeds.
Also, I live in a kind-of-rural place, gardening has helped me to appreciate the worth of all that beautiful nature around me that i hadn’t realized it was there.
4. The beauty of flowers. I haven’t had success with vegetables, so I had flowers. I loved just getting in the dirt and losing myself in concentration.
I live on a busy main street in my town, and when I gardened, I didn’t hear the traffic. It was just me and the dirt, weeds and flowers.
I used to have a very big flower garden in my front yard. I had a pizza delivered one summer night, and the college guy said to me that my garden smelled “heavenly”, and you could have knocked me over with a feather.
I used to spend eight to ten hours a Saturday in my garden. I have back problems now. Surgery is in my future. I have one or two pots of flowers on my front porch which brighten up my day, and a small hosta garden in the backyard.
I am so grateful for being able to garden. Maybe after surgery I can garden again. 🙂
5. For me it is not the garden itself, the sense of accomplishment, the quality of harvest, or the incredibly flavorfull dinners. It’s the me time. Me amd my morning coffee before the neighborhood stirs to life. Me and the bumble bees. Me and the dirty hands. Me and sharing the bounty with neighbors. Me and…
We all have a “me and” something of our own.
6. For me, I like participating in the transformation and transmission of good energy into my garden and community. I just got a community plot in a food desert area. It feels different to hold a veggie I harvest from there. All the time spent, and I always feel the pull to honor it and eat my veggies lol. Everything extra that I grow will go directly into the bellies of people who support us and it will nourish them.
7. Nurturing. I need to nurture. It’s my very purpose in this life. Gardening has saved my sanity, saved my life. Helps me deal with depression and loneliness.
Plus everything that you grow yourself just tastes better and the feeling of accomplishment can’t be beat!
8. I find gardening to be a peaceful experience, tending to plants, watering them, planting a new row of carrots,etc. Save for a few flowers that I grow for my wife, I grow 95% edibles. In the summer, when I want a snack, I’ll go into the backyard and forage rather than hit the fridge.
I also love how gardening isn’t 100% success / fail. Case in point, I didn’t do very well growing carrots last year yet ended up with enough for a side dish for a meal.
Maybe I’m trying to say that gardening is an extremely constructive process. Does that make sense? IMHO it is one of our best defences against rampant screen-time (and this is coming from a millennial)
9. It’s so soothing for me, a good workout also an excellent lesson in patience because sometimes plants work and sometimes they don’t and you just kind of have to let it all unfold and accept it.
10. In 2021 I lost my son. Someone gave me a plant after he died and I wanted to keep it alive I don’t have a green thumb I didn’t know actually if that would happen lol and I slowly added more and it actually became therapy for me and so healing. I love seeing new growth its makes me excited and I have met some of the most caring amazing people that love plants. Also I love learning about it all. This year I’m going to try a small garden I never done that before.
11. Literally everything. I work as a master gardener/landscaper 8 hours a day and then I come home and spend an hour or so playing in my own garden. I love flowers, I love the satisfaction of a job well done, I love watching all my flower baby’s grow up, I love learning what’s grows best where, I love fussing over my plants, I love getting dirty and sweaty and gross, I love seeing all my hard work pay off.
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