Importance of a home garden

Growing your own food gives you complete control over the chemicals and products used during the growing process. Organic produce typically costs more at the grocery store, but you can grow your own organic fruits and vegetables at home by skipping the chemical fertilizers and pesticides.

A home garden allows you to pick the produce when it is ripe, unlike produce at the store that is often harvested before it is fully ripe. The flavor and quality of the freshly picked produce from a home garden is superior to store-bought produce with unknown chemicals that was likely picked several days or weeks before being sold.

Healthy body

All that digging, planting and weeding burns calories and strengthens your heart. Gardening also reduces depression and anxiety helping you concentrate on things that matter. Gardening as a very healthy hobby that helps you build your self esteem and increases your productivity. Lastly eating healthy organic vegetables that you have grown yourself is better than buying other veggies that have been sprayed with pesticide and fertilizers. You can have a small garden even in your rental.

Horticultural therapy has been around for millennia, so it probably won’t surprise you to learn that working with plants is part of many addiction recovery programs.

In a study people in an addiction rehabilitation program were given an opportunity to participate in natural recovery, where they were allowed to choose either art or gardening as their natural therapy. People who chose gardening completed the rehab program at a higher rate and reported a more satisfying experience than those who chose art.

School gardens, family gardens, and community gardens are sprouting everywhere. The reason these small local gardens are flourishing may have as much to do with human interaction as it does with the produce.

Working in a garden with people of different ages, abilities, and backgrounds is a way to expand both what you know and who you know.

Care for our Environment

When it comes to waste, home gardens stand in stark contrast to supermarkets. From the farm to the supermarket, there is waste at every level. Being aware and informed of what causes waste does not mean that we’ll be able to eliminate it entirely, but it does mean that we can choose to make better choices about managing and reducing waste. When we choose to home grow vegetables and herbs, we make an active choice to reduce farm and supermarket waste and pollution – from food loss to plastic packaging and pollution caused by transportation and distribution networks.