We love this perfect time of year. As the days are growing longer, we are not only spending more hours on the farm but are taking time to relax and relish in the beauty of Summertime every day. The plants and animals are lively, and the children are playing in the sunshine to their hearts content. It is the ideal time for camping, swimming, picnics, and of course, gardening. As you may know, we spend much of our Summertime in the garden.
We are so thrilled with the progress our gardens have been making. We hope your beautiful gardens are turning out as well as ours are. As you may know, growing a garden isn’t solely important for providing us with wholesome foods—for there are many other hidden benefits to gardening. Let’s look at five of these benefits.
Vitamin D Exposure
A shocking 42% of Americans are deficient in vitamin D, the sunshine vitamin. Signs of vitamin D deficiency include tiredness, aches and pains, and severe muscle weakness. For your garden to thrive, you must spend numerous hours outside working. Your time spent outside gardening is a great and easy way to ensure you get enough vitamin D. Many folks spend plenty of time outside during this time of year, but if you struggle fitting in enough time outside, working to grow a garden will likely gift you with the sunshine your body needs.
Family Time
Some of our fondest memories are gardening together as a family. Throughout the years, we have spent quality time watering, weeding, and harvesting together. The best part is that gardening as a family doesn’t have to be looked at as a chore and can even be looked forward to each day. It is a great time to have a pleasant conversation without the busyness of life getting in the way.
Healthy
One thing that is nice about having a garden is that you are in control. You choose your foods, how much to plant, whether to use pesticides, and so on. Since you worked so hard to grow your food exactly the way you want it, when you harvest all those tasty fruits and vegetables, you will do everything you can to make sure they don’t go to waste! You will most certainly eat more fruits and vegetables as a side with your main courses. You may even look for main courses that have home-grown foods in them. If you’re like us, you will top your pancakes with home-grown fruit, make homemade cobblers, soups, vegetable platters, pies…anything that helps you use the healthy foods you have worked so hard to grow. You will likely find yourself eating fruits and vegetables as a snack rather than chips or cookies. When you eat this way, you will likely notice a difference in your energy levels; you can thank your garden for that.
Teaches Values
Gardening teaches so many valuable life lessons. Caring for plants takes a lot of dedication and is a great way to teach responsibility to children. You could assign them gardening tasks to help them to understand accountability. Starting out with something as small as a seed, caring for it, watching it slowly grow, and finally, getting to harvest and eat it teaches the art of delayed gratification. In a world that emphasizes instant gratification, gardening can show your little ones that although it takes a fair bit of time to see the reward, it does come. It can help them come to realize what many people unfortunately don’t understand: working and waiting for the reward is worthwhile.
Food Storage
In today’s world, having a food storage is growing more important every day. Growing a garden can provide the ongoing food storage you will need in good and bad times. There are numerous ways to preserve the food you grow. Fruits and vegetables can be made into sauces, juices, jams, pie fillings, and salsas. You can also store them for long periods of time frozen or canned. Storing fruits and vegetables this way tastes better than store-bought and is much cheaper. There is something about canning home-grown food that makes you appreciate it even more.
So, there you have it—a few of the reasons we love to garden. There are so many more hidden benefits to gardening that we could write an entire book on it. For now, though, come on into our store and see for yourself the gardening books that we have available…we have many books that the devoted gardener (novice or experienced) will love!
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