Gardening Benefits, Tips & Tricks
Benefits of Gardening
Gardening has many benefits for your health and also for our world! If you’ve been thinking about getting into gardening, whether to grow your vegetables or to attract butterflies to your yard, gardening can be a great source of entertainment and wellbeing. We’ll cover some of gardening’s amazing benefits and how you can start your very own vegetable garden this fall.
Gardening gets you out of the house and into nature (even if it’s only in your backyard). You get vitamin D from the sun while you’re gardening, and it encourages healthier eating. When you grow a dearth of fresh fruits and vegetables you’ll be inclined to eat them more often than when you buy a few from the store. Plus, gardening is a physical activity, which means that you’re getting exercise and working muscles that aren’t normally targeted in everyday life.
Gardening promotes mental health because it’s a form of stress relief. Just getting out into a green environment for a little bit each day has proven stress-relieving properties. Often gardening is a communal activity, whether you’re a part of a community garden, or you’re talking to your neighbor about tips and tricks for how to keep your garden thriving. This is a great activity to combat loneliness, especially as we’re all encouraged to limit our social interactions to help curb the spread of coronavirus. And finally, gardening promotes a strong mind as you learn how to take care of the different types of plants that you’re growing in your garden, and as you use your memory to keep track of when to water and harvest your vegetables.
While gardening is great for your mental and physical health, it also has tangible, positive effects on our environment! Gardening reduces our environmental footprint in numerous ways. When we eat fresh produce that we’ve grown in our gardens, we reduce our reliance on food products that have traveled an average of 1500+ miles before ever being consumed. We also reduce the number of trips that we make to the store, particularly as fresh veggies are usually the first items that we need to restock, which reduces the amount of greenhouse gases that we’re releasing into the atmosphere by driving our cars.
Gardening also means reducing waste. You don’t have to rely on produce that’s been packaged, as you can grow most things in your garden and you only need to harvest what you’ll use that week. Or you can freeze many fruits and vegetables to get a longer shelf life out of them. Turn your basil into frozen pesto cubes or make your favorite spaghetti sauce from all those ripe tomatoes! Not to mention, you can dry your homegrown herbs and save them in your very own DIY spice shakers. Gardening also encourages you to eat more seasonally, as you harvest those vegetables that can only be grown in summer, fall, or winter. You can change up your garden and then match new recipes and your diet to what’s currently growing!
Furthermore, gardening (particularly organic gardening) reduces our environmental impact as we no longer rely on commercial use of pesticides to grow our food. This is beneficial because pesticides contaminate our soil, water, turf, and vegetation. They kill off their target insects and weeds, but they are also harmful to many other organisms including birds, fish, and beneficial insects, which is why organic gardening is so important. It supports beneficial insects and birds by providing food and habitat for pollinators without introducing harmful chemicals into our environment. This is a huge health benefit to ourselves, too, by the way. So, let’s take a look at how you, too, can start gardening in your own backyard!
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
Gardening How-To
Gardening is easy and can be cheap to set up! You can plant a vegetable garden in a bed that you already have in your backyard, or you can build a simple raised garden bed. You can find an easy DIY raised garden bed here! Either way, you’ll want to make sure the garden bed gets at least six hours of sun each day. It’s important to make sure that you have plenty of nutritious soil to support the best plant growth possible.
Photo by Jonathan Hanna on Unsplash
A good vegetable garden has soil with plenty of organic matter, like compost, to help your vegetables grow. You can make your own soil mixture by mixing 50% topsoil and 50% compost or you can purchase premixed vegetable garden soil from your local gardening store. Stanley’s is a great option in Knoxville! Numerous organizations including Beardsley Community Farm and SEEED offer free compost for gardeners in our community - just follow them on social media to see when they restock their supply!
If you’re trying to build your vegetable garden on a budget, you can use the lasagna gardening method. You’ll start by placing twigs, leaves, and straw in the very bottom of your raised bed followed by vegetable ink newspapers and various compostable foodstuff (think coffee grounds and eggshells). Once you’re about 6-8 inches from the top of your bed, you’ll add your vegetable garden soil (preferably an organic blend). This method takes a little bit more time, but if you start now, you’ll have an amazingly nutritious garden bed to plant in the spring!
There are plenty of resources available online to help you give your garden the nutrition it needs. With time you’ll become a soil expert yourself.
Once your bed is ready and full of nutritious soil, it’s time to start planning and planting your vegetable garden! First thing, you’ll want to find out what planting zone you’re in. If you’re in Knoxville, we’re in planting zone 7a. You can then use this zone to figure out which vegetables will grow here and determine when you can plant in spring, summer, and fall. You can also find a good guide on when to plant which vegetable on the farmer’s almanac. The good news is that there’s still time for you to plant a fall vegetable garden if you decide that you want to give gardening a try!
Once you know what zone you’re in, what vegetables you want to plant, and when you can plant them, you can use this nifty planting planner to determine how many of each vegetable you can plant per square foot! Another thing to keep in mind while you’re planting is the beneficial nature of companion plants. Companion plants help each other to grow better, usually by warding off unwanted pests. Check out this great video created by Beardsley Community Farm for a good intro into some common companion plants!
If you don’t want to go through the effort of building your own raised beds, or you’re more interested in the community aspect of gardening, joining a local community garden could be the best option for you!
Local Community Gardens
Here’s a list of a few of Knoxville’s community gardens. You can peruse their websites to find out more information about them and about how you can get involved.
Beardsley Community Farm
Image from City of Knoxville
City of Knoxville Community Gardens
The City of Knoxville created this webpage and map which has the locations of different community gardens throughout the city. Take a look and reach out to one near you!
I hope this leads you on to a great gardening journey! Please send us pictures and updates of the gardens you develop.