Why Gardening is Good for Your Mental Health

Welcome to the Grow youw Self podcast. Surprising stories about the food we eat and inspiring conversations about what it really takes to live the whole and happy life we're all craving. I'm Nicole Johnsey Burke, your host and the owner of Rooted Garden and Gardenary Incorporated and author of Kitchen Garden Revival. Is it obvious yet? I'm kind of obsessed with the kitchen garden. The kitchen garden may just be the answer that you've been looking for on your own journey to health and wholeness. In this podcast. It's going to inspire and enable you to make garden magic right in your very own space. If you're someone who wants to eat more good food that's actually good for you, fill your day with great stories you want to text to a friend. If you want to hear more about inspiring people and do a little bit each day better than the way you do it the day before. Grow Yourself is what your ears have been waiting for. You won't just learn about gardening here, you'll learn how to make growing as a person a big part of your everyday life. And your life, your community. And your garden, of course, will be all the better for it. So put in your headphones, turn up the volume, and let's take a walk, go on a drive, or just hang out in the kitchen garden together. Welcome to Grow Yourself. Raise your hand if you could use some, let's just say, more emotional and mental stability. This year I've got both my hands up and my feet and whatever else I can put up to show you that I need help. 2020 has been a test for all of us, and some of us, and ways than one. Today I'm bringing back one of my most popular and downloaded episodes, all about how the garden is actually more about our mind than about our stomach. This episode aired way back in the spring and got so much great feedback that I wanted to bring it back one more time for this year, specifically because I have heard from so many people that this has been a super trying year in terms of keeping ourselves positive, hopeful, optimized, optimistic, and not crazy. Listen, mental health is a serious thing, and it's a thing that we should all be thinking about, taking care of ourselves and then directing and loving those that we care about towards their own journey to mental health. And believe it or not, the garden has a lot to teach us in terms of caring for our thoughts and our emotions. And in this episode, I dive into ways that the garden really, really helps us in terms of the way we think and our attitudes. So I hope you will Love this throwback to one of the most downloaded episodes of 2020 Garden for your Mind first and then your stomach. This episode is brought to you by the Gardenary Consultants. We now have hundreds of Gardenary consultants around the country who are ready to help you make your garden dreams come true. And believe it or not, if you didn't listen to last week's episode, fall is the best time to get up, to get set up and ready to grow for 2021. And after you listen to this episode you're definitely gonna wanna. So go check out the gardenary consultants@gardenary.com businesses or just click Find a coach and we will get you hooked up with the help you need to set up your garden this year in order to make 2021 much much better. I like the sound of that. Thanks so much for listening. Let's dive in to the podcast reasons why you should gard then your stomach. Let's do it. What was that? You thought gardening was just about food and your stomach and yummy things that you can eat again and again. Well, today I am going to show you how gardening is actually more about your head, your mind and your brain first. And then of course it's also about your stomach. In today's episode we are going to dive into the fact that gardening makes you happy. That is good for your head first, even more important than the food you're gonna get from the garden. So I can't wait to inspire you to grow your own happiness this season in today's episode. This episode is brought to you by my Kickstart your Kitchen Garden workshop. Listen, we are just about to head into summertime but that does not mean it's too late to start your own raised bed kitchen garden. So I have a great Kickstart workshop. It's super afford, it's only one hour long and it's gonna show you how you can make your own raised bed kitchen garden happen this summer, not next one. So go check it out@gardenary.com Kickstart and let's dive in to find out how the garden is so good for your head. I can't wait to go through this episode with you together today. Let's do it. Well, welcome back to the Grow youw Self podcast. I am so excited you're here. Today we are talking about a super important topic which is your br. Mind your thoughts and I believe it's mental health time. Yes, maybe something like that. I think it's mental health month and even if it's not, every month should be Mental Health Month because I believe that the thoughts we think change every part of our life. So I'm so excited to dive into this topic with you today. I think it's super important, especially given the current environment we're all living in, which is high stress and lots of challenges, and we got to keep our minds healthy. I want to stop here before I go any further and just say that if you are struggling seriously with harmful thoughts, with suicidal thoughts, with serious depression, don't be ashamed about it. And please, please reach out for help. The suicide hotline is 1-800-273-8255. Please stop right now and call them. Get help. I'm just choking up thinking about losing any of you. So if you're having hard times, that is totally a normal part of the human existence. Don't do anything that would keep you from growing with us tomorrow. So call that number if you need help and then listen to this podcast for all of us. We all have our ups and downs. We all have days where our thoughts are challenging and hard to control. And I've had my ups and downs in my own life, too. So today I want to talk to you about how the garden can help us. How the garden can be part of the healing and the health that our minds need in this current day and age. So I'm going to open up with a line from. A couple lines actually, from my new book, Kitchen Garden Revival, which is now out everywhere. If you haven't ordered it yet, what are you waiting for? It's doing so well on Amazon, Barnes and Noble. Thank you so much. It's been number one in the area of garden design and I just love seeing it in all your hands. So go check it out. You can order it at gardenary.com book why Kitchen Garden mental health is quickly becoming the key indicator of overall wellbeing. Depression, anxiety, stress and burnout are all serious in themselves. But those challenges are also linked to cancer, high blood pressure, and heart disease. Our minds and bodies are connected in ways we're just starting to understand. And in this fast paced and demanding world, we've got to find ways to slow down, reconnect with nature, and care for ourselves again. When you learn to grow yourself, you literally grow yourself. The biggest reason to have a kitchen garden is for your happiness. Stepping outside into the garden each day has been proven to help do just that. And there is no more practical way to push you outside than if the tastiest parts of your dinner are growing right in that spot. You've got to Eat anyway. So why not pursue a mindful activity that not only feeds your mind and soul, but also fills your stomach? A kitchen garden may just be the most practical hobby you can pursue. You'll learn skills, good exercise, wake up your senses each time you step outdoors and return with an armload of fresh food. So that's from the preface of my book, Kitchen Garden Revival. And I really believe that. I tell people that I sell happiness in a box, a raised bed, kitchen garden box, full of soil and plant and seeds. It seems like I'm puddling and selling the garden, but really what I'm trying to sell is happiness. I, deep down, believe that there is happiness sitting outside your door, waiting for you to grow it yourself. So today I'm going to tell you why. When we think about gardening, I think a lot of times we sometimes think it's something we've grown past as a civilization. I know I kind of grew up with this, and I see this in media as well. Lots of kids movies and shows. I see this depicted where, like, characters or, you know, main. Main people in the story are trying to get off the farm. You know, it's just. I'm going to give you the most basic one I can think of at the moment, but it's from the Disney movie Planes. So in this movie, Dusty, I think is. His name is a crop duster. He is stuck on the farm working to produce food, and his dre is to become a race, like a jet who races around the world. And the whole story is basically centered around that ambition that he's just so, so ready to leave the farm. And I watched that movie years ago as I was first starting to garden and started to think of all the other storylines I'd seen where basically the whole point of the story, the whole climax was, can the character leave the farm? Can the character leave the garden? And the place where food is kind of laboriously produced? So even as I went into the field of gardening, I was met with a little bit of disdain. Like farming and gardening, those are industries that we've moved beyond basically, as a culture, and we obviously all still want to eat. But I think a lot of people who, you know, say work in some kind of more, I don't know, desk job, see that because they have that kind of education or they've paid for that, you know, that advancement in their careers, that it's a waste of time and really not a good investment of their time to get out and dig in the dirt, you know, that they now can work and afford to pay someone else to do that for them. So I would like to kind of push against that a little bit and say that I think if you look back over the evolving of the human species, that it's the cultivation of the ground, the growing of food, that really helped us to become who we are now and a thriving species. When you kind of study world history, you see that every time people settled down and began to really grow crops and foods right where they lived, that's when their civilizations really began to thrive. And that is really, I believe the more I garden and the more I meet gardeners, that that is actually a piece of humanity that we should maintain in some form. I'm not at all saying we all need to be farmers or homesteaders living off the grid, providing all of our food. But I do think that gardening in the smallest container is vital to all humans happiness because it is in our dn to be connected to soil and seeds for survival. So there's my soapbox. How did you like that? I first woke up to this reality when I moved to China. I lived in a rural area. I had grown up in the feminist movement, which I am so thankful for in so many ways because it allows me to be where I am career wise now. But part of that movement was getting women out of the kitchen. So we had tons of frozen meals, packaged meals. I for one, loved snackwell's cookies and Frosted Flakes and rolled gold pretzels. Those were my snacks. Every day after school. I was pretty disconnected from the source of my food. Food for me in my high school, middle school, college years was about opening up a package and taking a bite. When I moved to China, especially when we would head out to these minority villages, we would spend overnights there. And everything, every meal, every bit you took was connected to a physical activity outdoors. So in the early morning, no one was eating right when they woke up or drinking anything. They just head outside and begin to gather materials for that morning's fire and pick the greens and, you know, pull say leftovers from the evening before and start to put together what's going to be like a midday meal. Like around, not really mid morning, I guess around 10am we would eat the first meal of the day. So they had already been outdoors probably for one to two hours, gathering both the materials that we'd eat and also the materials to build the fire. Then they would labor throughout the rest of the day in their fields from say 10:30 until about 5, 5:30, and then begin to gather the materials for that evening's. Dinner. So again, materials for the fire and then materials again for what we'd eat. So almost always it was rice coupled with some kind of soup that was a mixture of greens, and they'd use, say, a bone of some sort to flavor the soup. We'd have, like, tomatoes in there and kind of a wide variety of fresh vegetables. This is the first time I saw the connection between physical movement, outdoor time, fresh harvest connected with eating, that you couldn't just open a cupboard and take a bite. You couldn't just open a package or head to the store. You had to move your body, you had to gather up materials, and you had to work before you could eat. This opened my eyes in a completely new way to food and to the connection of gardening with our whole selves, our bodies, and especially our heads. So I want to take that experience and my own experience, honestly, my years, up and down of feeling good mentally, and then my years of feeling not very good mentally, and show you how gardening, just the littlest bit of gardening can literally do so much good for your head, whoever you are. So I'm gonna give you, I think, at least six reasons why gardening is for your head first and then for your stomach. So, number one, the number one reason why gardening is so, so good for your brain is that it gets you outside. So we know we need to get outside more often, but sometime kind of hard to do it. I loved reading this study about a new movement called Park Prescriptions. And it's from a couple of psychologists and doctors who are writing up what they call Park Rx. And it's pretty cool. So they are for a variety of their patients who may struggle with obesity, mental health, chronic conditions like hypertension or type 2 diabetes. They're not just prescribing medicine. They're saying, hey, hey, I'm going to write this up, and you need to go get outside at least 20 minutes a day. The whole article is pretty encouraging. Just Talking about how 20 minutes outside every day will help you to literally feel happier. Well, there's. Like I said in my book, there's no better reason to step outside than if you got to go out there to get some things for dinner. I experienced this firsthand when I first started gardening in Houston, and we were growing so many greens. You've heard me tell that story ad nauseam. I know. That really was my first. I love those memories. So we would have days where it was raining, days where it was cold, dark, whatever, and I had not bought any salad because we had so much growing in the garden. And so to make Jason's lunch for work, or to make my lunch or whatever, I would have to go outside. I didn't have a choice. You know, it wasn't the lettuce was not sitting in the fridge. And I would find even in those five minutes of me stepping outside, breathing outside air, air, feeling whatever nature was handing me that day, that I just literally kind of came to my senses, my head cleared up and I felt better. There's a reason why they say you need a breath of fresh air, right? So there's a saying of this new terminology called ecotherapy, where they're studying the effects of nature, time spent in nature and how it isn't just good, say, for dealing with obesity or diabetes, but also reduces stress, reduces anxiety, and reduces depression. Now, it's funny, Doctors love to link medicine and prescriptions with effects, but they're very hesitant to draw direct lines with something as obscure as spending time outdoors. And yet they continue to find with studies that people who spend more time outdoors are healthier, Their bodies are healthier, but also their minds are healthier. And so they found that when you're outside, it's basically like having a therapy session. It's not just the air, but it's the sounds, and it can even be the silence that people's blood pressure drops, their cortisol drops. I don't know if you know what cortisol is, but it's your stress hormone, basically that fight or flight response that calms down and suddenly you just. You feel better when you're outdoors. Well, the garden is, I think, one of the best excuses to get outside more and obvious, obviously, a way to help your brain feel better. I can relate to this because, honestly, the years that I struggled most with depression and really hard feelings were the years where I was indoors the most. My years in college, my four years in college, where I was spending inordinate amount of time studying in my books, with my computer and classrooms and meetings. My two years in China, actually, ironically, though, we would have those times out was with the villagers. We had a lot of time in the city and the air quality wasn't great. And it was honestly, sometimes culturally kind of overwhelming to step outside because I was white and tall and big and everyone stared at me. And so I spent a lot of times indoors there, and I really did struggle with off and on, feelings of depression. And then even here in my new home in Chicago, I've really struggled with the months cold and darkness and have found my attitude, my mental health, honestly, I have to work super hard so much harder to stay happy and to keep my mind clear than I did when I've lived in warmer climates where I can be outdoors more often. I also saw this with my children. I've had four children, and they were all very fussy babies. I don't know if it was me or them, but no one seemed happy for a long time. It was so interesting, I think, to realize, to watch them, they would be so fussy indoors. And I wanted to just stay indoors because most of the time I just want to go to sleep. And the minute I am telling you, the minute I would walk outdoors with them, the mood would immediately change. It was like the minute their face felt the refreshing feeling of outdoor air. They would calm down, they would look around. What's that word? Their senses were suddenly enthralled with all that they could see. And I, I talk about walking Monticello with Carolyn when she was first born, when we lived in Charlottesville. And a lot of that was because she wasn't happy anywhere else. If children, if babies do these things instinctively, I think we can learn so much about the human species by observing what children and babies need. Babies need outside time. I think us, as big babies, we do too. That's the first reason why gardening is going to be so good for your mind. First is because it's going to make you get outside. And getting outside is good for you. You need to be getting outside. The doctors say 20 minutes a day. I say even more if possible. The second reason why gardening is so good for your head is kind of ironic, but it has to do with your muscles. It makes you move. So we know exercise boosts your mood. I hope you know that. So I read a study from Michael Otto, a PhD professor of psychology at Boston University. And he says people know that exercise helps physical outcomes. There's much less awareness, though, of the mental health outcomes and much, much less ability to translate this awareness into exercise action. But the link between exercise and mood is very strong. Usually within 5 minutes after moderate exercise, you're going to get a mood enhancement effect. Been following me on Instagram during the COVID pandemic. I have been forcing myself to get out and run for about 20 minutes every morning. Some mornings I skip, and the days I skip. Oh, my gosh, I'm in such a bad mood. Exercise releases endorphins. It gets our blood pumping. It does all these things that help our mind feel, think better, get happier. And gardening is a great form of exercise. Now, don't get Me wrong. Gardening is not going to replace your orange theory class or your five mile run. It's not the same kind of exercise. So it's not like this high cardio workout, right, where your heart is just pounding and pumping and you're sweating. What gardening is, is a slow form of exercise. And one of the neat things about it that I've discovered is when I'm on my run, 20 minute run, I am ready for those 20 minutes to be up. So as soon as I round the corner and my watch tells me I've done 2.2 miles, I'm stopping like I am done. I walk in the door, get my water, go up and take my shower, right? But gardening is not that kind of exercise. Gardening, because it is purposeful exercise, you'll actually do it for much, much longer. So instead of it being a class or a run, it's something where you're, you're actually taking care of business, you're doing stuff. And it's almost a distraction from the physical exercise. Studies have shown that basically when people garden, they keep their heart rate at, it's not aggressively high, but moderately high for a much longer period of time than someone who just shows up at the gym for 30 minutes or something. Pretty cool, right? Studies show that basically we need to burn about 2,000 calories a week with exercise. I don't know about you, but I'm always discouraged when I go for a run and I come back and it's like, congratulations, you just burned 200 calories. I'm like, are you kidding me? I just drank that in coffee this morning. I mean, you know, I drink enough milk and sugar in my coffee to make it worth it, right? So it's kind of a bummer when you realize how much work you have to do to burn calories. And if you're just doing these short little spurts of aggressive exercise, then you're rarely going to hit your 2,000 calories. But just slow, the slow burn of gardening, you can burn off about 300 calories an hour doing things like weeding and trimming and raking. You know, whatever you're doing in your garden, you're going to be building muscle tone, you're going to be building your strength, and you're going to be staying out in the garden working out longer, which is going to make you feel better. I personally have gone up and down. I talk some about my food addiction and challenges. In the episode called Fill up with the Good Stuff, what did I do? I just messed up my own line. Anyway, Fill up on the good stuff. I talk about how I've struggled with eating rules and all kinds of things. And I won't go too far into it here, but I will say that I had certain seasons where I would try to replace my issues with food, with overeating, with over exercising. So just like, spending all my time trying to burn, burn, burn, burn the calories, and then I'd kind of come back to neutral and realize, okay, that's okay. I actually need to do other things besides exercise today. And would often find myself in a tension of how much exercise is too much exercise. It's around this time that I stumbled upon, I think it was when I was in China and watching the people I was there with how their food was connected to physical exercise. And kind of looking back on human civilization, like I mentioned at the beginning, and seeing, okay, for all time, since humans have begun to exist, there's this very strong connection between moving our bodies physically and then getting to eat, right? So like a hunter, even take a hunter or a gatherer, right? Like, it's just a long walk to go find the berries, and then you bring the berries back and then you eat. Or it's a long hunt, you know, before you shoot the whatever and bring it home and cook it. And even for the people I was working with in China, right, it was a long stroll out in the morning to gather all the greens, to gather the wood to burn and to set up the breakfast. And so. So it's just so natural and so part of our human experience to connect physical movement with eating. And I think that does something. I think there's a connection inside of our brains that's longing for that. So when we're just inside, not connected at all to the way our food grows, to the whole process of the garden, and we're just kind of breaking open a package of whatever from the pantry and putting it in our mouths. I think our bodies, I think our minds, I think our whole human selves kind of go, something's wrong here. Like, it just. We know somewhere deep down inside of who we are that there's got to be some kind of personal exercise, some kind of movement of our bodies before we've earned that bite. I think it's very similar to working, to showing up and doing work for your employer, for your client, whoever, and then receiving the paycheck, right? There's this kind of ying and yang, this back and forth where you give something and then you get something. And it's weird if someone just gives you a check and you didn't work for it, or if you work and you don't get the check. And so I think the same thing is going on in our brains with our food. And even though I am by no means a homesteader or someone who provides even 85% of my food from my garden, I have a very strong connection in my brain with stepping outside and tending and then coming back in and eating. Okay, that's number two. So the garden will get you moving, and moving makes you feel good in your brain. Number three is that gardening is going to give you a sense of accomplishment. So I read this when I was first starting my path down gardening. I was like, why does gardening make me feel so good? And I read this article that said gardening is like, this was actually before I had my dogs. And I was like, how does gardening compare to having a pet? Because I was trying to decide, do I need a pet pet or not? It turns out I need both, I guess. But one of the things that the article said is that when you nurture a pet and you feed it and you walk it and you hug it and you watch that thing thrive, that is one of the reasons why having a pet makes you feel so good, because you're literally watching the productivity of yourself. You're watching, you get to see the results of what you do. So many of the things we do as humans, we never really get to see the results of them, or it's very hard in the day to day to see the results, results of our hard work. But having a pet watching, you know, I've watched my two puppies, Ponyo and Totoro, over the last two years, grow and thrive and be so strong. And, you know, just, it's so fun to see that happen. I mean, of course, I've gotten to do that with my kids, too, but the dogs don't talk back to me. So anyway, so pets. And then the article compared that with gardening. And it's the same kind of deal where you, you nourish something, you tend to it, you. You prune it, you clean it, you harvest from it. And when you see that thing thriving under your care, it gives you this feeling of, I did something that matters. And sometimes that is the exact feeling our brain is longing to feel. That is the thing our brain wants to make it feel happy is like, I have a reason to wake up this morning, I have a reason to step outside this morning. I have these plants that need me, and I'm gonna go take care of them. And it can sound so unimportant. But sometimes that little simple nudge to get outside and go take care of the plants that need you is exactly what we need. So super simple. I would say for me, that has been a huge part of my growing over the last 10 years. And what has kept me coming back to the garden, also what's pushed me in own profession, in setting up kitchen gardens for clients and in pushing my own business, rooted garden and now gardenary, is that feeling of accomplishment, a feeling of pride, of growing something under your care and watching it thrive with a little bit of attention every single day. So a lot of times, what our mind is looking for to cheer it up, to make it feel better, is. Is hope, is positive change. And you can often find that right outside in your garden. The number four reason why gardening is so good for our minds is because it helps with boredom. Anyone struggling with boredom during the pandemic? Hello. So, yeah, we've all. A lot of us have been home for many months now, and I think boredom is. Is honestly one of the worst things that humans can go through. Again, I think this goes back to our initial existence as humans. You know, like at the beginning of our species growing and thriving. They were never bored, right? Because they were always scared and desperate to get food and to stay alive. Like, there were so many things they had to fight against to keep going. And so, again, I think there's something that tells our brains as humans, something's really wrong here if you feel bored, because, like, if you're a human being, like, you should have a lot of adventure going on, just like your caveman ancestors did. And so I think the garden is a place absolutely. That's so good. It's such a good cure for boredom. And I think boredom is probably one of the worst foods you can feed a depressed mind. You know that feeling when your mind wakes up and feels like there's nothing exciting ahead of you that day, that there's nothing to look forward to or to go check out. That's one of the worst feelings for a brain that's struggling. And the garden is the opposite of that. So there are ornamental landscapes, which I do love. So things like boxwoods and hedges and bushes and trees, and those definitely have their place in the landscape. But one of the reasons why I dedicated my work 100% to kitchen gardens, to food gardens, is because of their dynamic nature. All the foods that we eat on an annual basis that are planted by seed and grown in a kitchen garden, most of those plants all begin and finish their life. Cycle in less than 90 days, some in less than 45 days. And probably the stretch would be, say nine months for something like garlic. So what that means the dynamic nature of all these plants means that they are literally changing overnight. That is not an exaggeration versus having a boxwood or a big bush where you could go, look at it today and 10 months from today and it's going to look barely different. The plants in your vegetable garden are going to be changing every single minute of every single day. And that to me is one of the great cures for boredom. If you've heard about the idea of blue zones, Blue zones is the study of it's lessons for living longer from people who've lived the longest. So they did these studies on cultures where people seem to live a lot longer than they did in other parts of the world. And as you can guess, one characteristic of these people is that they garden. But another characteristic that I thought was so interesting is that they can readily articulate the reason they are getting up in the morning. People in these cultures have purpose imbued lives that give them clear roles of responsibility and feelings of being needed well into their one hundreds. It says this is for the Okinawan communities. It says most centurions from the Okinawan communities grow, or once grew, a garden. It's a source of daily physical activity that exercises the body with a wide range of motion and helps reduce stress. It's also a near constant source of fresh vegetables. So when you read the characteristics of these people groups that have lived a long time, which I think also means their minds are the healthiest, there's kind of this circle of things that are all interconnected. They eat mostly plant based meals, they wake up with purpose, they spend lots of time outdoors and they garden. So you can see how all those things kind of go together. And I think just even that idea of waking up and feeling like you have something to go check on, something to go see, is so powerful. I teach an online course called Kitchen Garden Academy and we have a community there where we share our wins and losses and people can ask questions of myself and the other gardenary garden coaches. And just recently one of our students stepped in and she said, this is the only way I've been able to survive the pandemic. She said, I was, I was so depressed. I was having such a hard time. And now I love waking up in the morning and going out and checking my garden. She said, I literally spend so much time out there to watch what's happening. It's been the best therapy I could have signed up for. And it was just such a good example of how we need a distraction sometimes from our own boring thoughts. And the garden can be that. For me, I will say, the garden was that when I was first home with my four kids. So I had lost, you know, I was still working by contract in the area of philanthropy. I was doing paperwork, like writing papers and that kind of thing. But for the most part, I mean, most of my day was diapers and tantrums and nursing and cooking and just tantrums and then some more tantrums. And there were days where a lot. I would say a big part of my brain was super bored. I mean, I loved nurturing my children, and I wouldn't take that time back for the world. But there was certainly pieces of me that were just kind of spinning in a circle, trying to find something interesting to set down on. The garden really was that thing for me. I was home. I couldn't leave. I was always, as I've said before, in nap jail. The garden was a place where I could go and literally be entertained every single day with the growth and the change that was happening out there then. Turns out it was a great cure for boredom for my kids. Kids, too. So win. Win. All right, number five. The number fifth reason why gardening is so good for your head is because it is meditative. Have you ever been told you should meditate or pray or get quiet with your thoughts? I grew up in the church, and I was always taught to pray and pray a lot and that I should pray for 30 minutes every morning. My mind is like a squirrel brain. I am just going in all kinds of different directions from the minute my eyes. I just have a really busy brain. And I always felt frustrated with myself that I could never just sit still and let my thoughts be still. They would just literally run a mile a minute. And I always felt guilty. I'm such a bad prayer. And then as I got introduced to the idea of meditation, well, then the guilt really came on, right? Like, how in the world do I do this? So meditation is kind of like cleaning your brain. That's what prayer is, too. It's basically, you know, like, really taking a minute to observe your thoughts and observe what's going on inside of your head and look at it almost from an outsider's perspective. And I've just always had trouble doing that, especially just sitting still and doing it. But what I found is that the garden actually allows me to pray, to meditate, and to clear my head. And what I found is that I actually need an almost mindless activity to do to calm my head down. So my mom says, for her, that's folding laundry. I don't like to fold laundry. So for me, it's gardening. So let's say I can just be working a row of radishes, right? And I'm just thinning them out. So I'm just going one by one by one. And it's pretty mindless. I mean, you know, I don't need a college education to do it. I don't need to understand even the complexities of a radish. I don't even need to know what a radish is to do it. I'm just literally picking them up. And in that moment, in that practice, all of a sudden that busy part of my brain calms down because it's kind of distracted. And then I can go to that deeper part of my brain and have clearer thoughts. I have to say, some of my best thoughts have come from during my garden time. Even my business ideas. Like, to even start my business, I would say so many of ideas I have come when I'm in that meditative state, almost when I'm just out in the garden working. I have this part in the book where I talk about how maybe we wish our plants could talk to us, because everybody says you should talk to your plants. But I have this whole chapter where I said, what if our plants could talk to us? And then I kind of quote what I think they would say. And then I was like, oh, wait, wait, wait, wait. We actually don't want our plants to talk to us. This is a good thing that the plants are quiet anyway. The plants are quiet, and it quiet you and quiets your mind. And you can meditate in a very different kind of way. Like, I'm never going to get an award for being a good meditator, but I can still clear my head out in the garden. And sometimes a depressed mind, a struggling mind, a heavy mind, that's just what it needs is a moment of lifting, a moment of clearing. And that can happen outdoors. So there's a great quote in the New York Times. It was called how to Be Mindful While Gardening. And it was from Sue Schwartz, who's the founder of Unplug Medicine Meditation and the author of Unplug A Simple Guide to Meditation for Busy Skeptics and Modern Soul Seekers. That sounds like me. Caring for your garden can be a great form of mindfulness meditation. By connecting with the earth and with the practice of gardening, you can cultivate a healthy mind and feel calm and connected. Simply planting a seed with intention or touching soil can be transformative. So go ahead and get a little dirty. All right, so no more excuses for not being able to pray or meditate. Okay? Number six is that gardening brings healing. I first was introduced to this idea and the power of this when my first year of business. A lovely man named Andrew hired me to do a consult for him, and he ordered a garden that's actually in my book. It's a beautiful stone garden, three gardens in a circle, actually, that we created in honor of his three daughters. It turned out that Andrew was right in the middle of a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, and I'm going to try not to get upset here. And he ended up passing away about a year and a half after I got to build the garden for him. During that time, as he struggled through his diagnosis and his treatment, I would often arrive to the garden and see him coming out to water it, to tend it, to pull from it. He texted me often, especially at the beginning of his diagnosis, and said that he saw the garden as part of his therapy and his treatment and his healing, and also as a lasting gift he would give his wife, his beautiful wife, Shanna. I've seen this story happen more than once in my business where we have been hired by people who have either just survived cancer or just lost a loved one or are going through cancer in the middle of their garden installation. Just last summer, we had a similar situation with a beautiful woman named Rena who was just in the middle of her ovarian cancer treatment, and she ended up getting the most gorgeous kitchen garden that summer. Hopefully she was hoping she was in remission, but ended up passing away as well this spring. Okay. It's hard. Sorry. I think that oftentimes we. We. I know I. For. I didn't realize how the garden could be such a healing place, especially for people in the middle of pain. Okay, I'm going to pull myself together here. Audrey Hepburn is known for saying, to plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow. A lot of people love to put that quote up, and I've never seen that be so true as when I've gotten to work with clients who are struggling with pain and loss. And I think it's a great, beautiful way to work through a hard time. There's actually a whole. I read a good number of articles called Grief Gardening about the idea of gardening through your grief. And one article from Matthew Pace said there may be something in gardening associated with providing Hope. For those who may have little else to hope for, this might ultimately be the most beneficial aspect of gardening therapy. Guys, I cannot pull myself together. Okay? I did a. I do these letter boards on Instagram and I did one. I don't even know if I did it out of the letter board. I think it was just a graphics. And I did a couple summers ago, and it said, all I'm saying is you never seen me crying and gardening at the same time. For my little page at that time, it was one of my most popular posts. And part of it, I think, was because it was a little controversial because so many people came on and said, whoa, whoa. I cry in the garden all the time. I go to the garden to cry. It was really impressive to see how many people came out and said, it's totally good to cry in the garden. Like, that's somewhat what the garden is there for. So anyway, I did not mean to get all emotional on you guys. I truly love our clients and losing them has been very hard, especially because you get to watch them fall in love with the garden and grow with the garden even as they struggle. So love you guys, Rinna and Andrew and so many more. All right, so this was another quote from May Sartin, an American poet. Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace. So good, right? Are you guys getting convinced that you should garden? I hope so. The very last reason, number seven, that gardening is good for your head, your mind, your brain, is that gardening brings us together as people. One of the worst feelings to have in your mind is to feel like you're alone. Back to that beginning of human civilization. The only way humans stayed alive is if they stayed together. It was impossible to be out on your own and make it. You needed to be with a tribe. The tribe protected you. The tribe could. Part of the tribe could stay up and watch overnight. When you had to sleep, one member of the tribe could go get food while you stayed back with the babies and vice versa. The only way that humans have stayed alive is by sticking together. And yet these days, so many things can attribute to all of us being alone. And that's not good for our heads. So the garden is a great place to come back together first. It'll help you connect with the sources of your food. I talk about this a lot, but the soul soil providers in your area, the growers, the farmers. Just last week, I went out to a farm to buy new plants for my garden and I got to connect with growers and students learning to farm. It was just such a great way to connect with some of the best people in my community. But it also connects you with other people in your community. So every time I'm out in my garden, my neighbors come by and talk to me and ask me what I'm growing. It starts up so many great conversations. You're also going to harvest so much that you'll get to share with others, which makes you feel good that you have something that you can contribute and share with other people. There is an amazing study on the benefits of gardening and it said that this was also published by the Blue Zones studies, but it said that the benefits of gardening on happiness are similar across all the racial boundaries and between urban and suburban areas. It was this really rare experience where they saw that gardening actually impacted everybody in a similar way. So whether you were low income or high income or educated or had less education that the joy and the happiness that you had was the same. I think this points back to that original beginning of humans, right? It's like we can all, when we have our hands in the dirt, we go, I'm home, you know, and no matter who we are or where we're coming from, it connects us. The researchers in this study also found that the level of emotional well being or happiness reported while gardening was similar to what people got when they were working out. And that it's the only activity out of the 15 studied for which women and people with low incomes actually got higher emotional well being than people with men than that for men and medium and high income participants. So basically what they're showing you there is that people who are generally underserved, who are overlooked females and those of low income are the ones that enjoy it the most. So cool, right? Gardening can connect us across our racial boundaries, across our economic boundaries, across our city's boundaries. I can't tell you how many times I drove into places I never would have gone when I was sourcing materials in Houston for my clients. Some of the best growers, the best soil providers were in some of the harder spots of Houston. And by buying from them, by connecting with them, I was supporting their hard work and also finding just this basic connection that we already had, but I had never discovered before. So gardening connects you with people. It's this perfect moment where you look at each other and you get to share a really delicious bite or the joy of watching this vine take off off of the trellis. And it's so powerful all right, I've done my crying. I think I'm good now. Gardening is good for your head. Do it for your head more than for your stomach. Your stomach is still going to get to enjoy it and the bites will be so delicious. But listen, this is more about the way you think and your thoughts determine how you feel. And, and that is what we have all got got to take care of. Let me read you one more section from my book. Consider money spent in the garden, like money spent on gym equipment, a club membership, or a music lesson. Or simply consider it as paying for a doctor's visit. The saying is a little lame, but it doesn't mean it is not true. Gardening is cheaper than therapy and you get tomatoes. It would take quite a few therapy sessions to equal the cost of a kitchen garden, but you will at least get to eat your results. Listen, when I try to get you to garden, I'm really trying to get you to be more happy. I think that the the future of our society, the future of us as humans, depends on us learning how to be happy in the simplest ways. And gardening is very simple. It is the thing that can give us a simple pleasure, a happiness that we're longing for. And I think as humans, we were just meant to do it. And I think your brain is telling you that. So thanks so much for listening to my seven reasons why gardening is good for your brain. Let me just recap them real fast for you. Number one, Gardening gets you outside. Number two, Gardening gets you moving. Number three, gardening is going to give you a sense of accomplishment. Gardening cures boredom. Number four, gardening is meditative. Number five, gardening brings healing. Number six, that's the one I cried. Number seven, gardening brings us together. And speaking of together, I love being together with you. Thank you so much for listening to the Grow youw Self podcast. If this was of value to you, if you learned something new, if you feel inspired, I would absolutely love it if you'd take a screenshot of it. Screenshot of your or just a selfie of yourself listening and share it with your friends and your family on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, wherever you hang out online. Invite other people to come over here and to find happiness too. Subscribe and leave a review. It makes all the difference in the world, I promise. Invest in your own happiness. Invest in your mind and your brain. Make yourself happy and I promise you'll find yourself helping other people around you become happier too. I love you guys. Thanks for listening and I'll see you next week. Phew. That was an episode and a half. I've never cried over here before, but, well, there's always a first time. Thank you so much for listening to the Grow youw Self podcast. I'm here to help you be inspired to get happy inside your garden, and I hope you feel inspired to do just that. Don't forget that the best way to get your garden going this season is to get my Kickstart your kitchen garden workshop. It's very affordable, it's just one hour long, and it will show you the step by step you need to get going right now, right away. Don't let another summer pass without you having your own raised bed kitchen garden. You can learn more at gardenary. Com Kickstart. I love you. I'll see you next week. Thanks for listening to Grow Yourself.