Homeowners and even apartment dwellers started looking to backyard gardening during the pandemic lockdowns as a way to occupy their time. Now, more are discovering that gardening has more advantages than just a creative way to spend an afternoon.
Multiple reasons exist for why backyard gardening is important. It gives you healthier, more nutritious food, helps reduce stress, encourages exercise, and even reduces the risk of long-term diseases like dementia. It also improves your home’s value and creates a cleaner environment. Plus, it’s a good way for a family to bond and to teach children about nature.
The article below explains why it would benefit you to start a backyard garden this year.
How a Backyard Garden Helps You?
A backyard garden has a direct effect on the gardener and all of it is positive. It can help you get healthier both inside and out.
It Improves Your Food and Meals
You will never buy a tomato shipped to a grocery store once you’ve had a garden-grown tomato.
An advantage of having your own garden is you can grow the food you and your family like. You control everything about it from the fertilizer you use to how to control pests. You also decide, to some limited degree, when to harvest it.
Garden vegetables and herbs are proven to be more nutritious than shipped produce. That’s because garden vegetables ripen outside while shipped products must be picked early for distribution. Ripening naturally means more nutrients.
It Saves You Money
Gardens also save you money in the long run. Seeds are cheap and can produce enough food for summer and winter if you know how to freeze and can. That reduces your shopping bill.
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Gardening Gets You Outside and Moving
Gardening gets you moving outside where the sun is bright and the air is refreshing. That does a lot for your health. The workout helps your overall heart health, the sunshine gives you Vitamin D, and the fresh air helps respiratory issues.
Gardening Reduces Stress
Playing in the dirt with flowers you love, growing vegetables, or trimming shrubs reduces stress. It gets your mind off things like work and creates a special time for yourself. This can help reduce depression, anxiety and can even help you make better decisions.
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It Can Prevent Long-Term Illness
Some studies show regularly gardening can reduce the risk of dementia. A long-term study published in 2006 showed seniors lowered dementia risk by 36 percent when including physical exercise, particularly gardening, into their routine.
Gardening can also combat loneliness by keeping people busy and giving them a purpose.
How a Backyard Garden Helps the Community?
While a garden can affect you positively, it can also help your neighborhood by visibly improving it. That has benefits for everyone.
It Improves Home Values
Working in your backyard helps your neighborhood and the community in ways you’ve probably not thought about. First, it helps you keep your backyard well-kept. That raises your home value but also can help indirectly add to the neighborhood’s overall home values.
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Gardening Keeps the Environment Cleaner
Vegetable gardens, reduce the carbon footprint by your family becoming less dependent on transported food.
Growing trees, shrubs and flowers add to neighborhood beauty but also adds oxygen to the air. Some of those have multiple purposes in that they are also edible or can be used for jams, and jellies.
How a Backyard Garden Helps Your Family?
Many families have learned that gardening together allows for the quality time both kids and parents want and also gives parents a way to practically show children things they’ve heard about in school.
Gardening Is a Teaching Tool
So many lessons can be taught through gardening. Children learn how food grows, the biology of a seed, tree, or flower, and what it takes to grow different things.
More than that, they learn that anything of value takes work. They learn to follow instructions. They also learn patience as they watch things grow.
A garden helps children grow more gratitude as well for food and all the people it took to put it on the table.
It Gets the Family Together
Growing things, whether it’s flowers or vegetables, can be an excellent bonding experience for the family who takes it on as a project. It’s time spent together without phones, television, and other electronics.
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FAQs
What is backyard gardening?
Backyard gardening means you are growing your own vegetables, greens, and fruits to feed your family daily. While the term over the past two years refers to edible gardens, backyard gardening has traditionally meant any type of gardening around your home whether it’s flowers, shrubs, trees, fruits, or vegetables.
Do you need a backyard to have a backyard garden?
No, you don’t need a backyard to grow things like vegetables, herbs, greens, and flowers. Many people who live in apartments, condos, or townhouses try their hand at potted gardening.
Many of the same plants grown in a traditional garden do just fine in pots. Pots can be placed on a back deck, front porch, patio, balcony, or even a sunny window space.
Why do people create backyard gardens?
Some like the idea of doing something physical where they can enjoy the result later, either on their table or by the floral beauty. Others find it a relaxing way to reduce stress and get outside.
Are there disadvantages to backyard gardening?
Backyard gardening has a few downsides. The garden won’t wait. It needs weeding, watering, and harvesting whether you feel like it or not. It’s a lot of work.
It isn’t cheap when you first start because there are tools and supplies to buy.
The biggest downside is there is no guarantee your garden will be successful. It could do well and a big storm wipes it out before harvest.
Is backyard gardening legal?
Most places don’t have a legal issue with a backyard garden. However, there could be some homeowner association rules about where to place it and the size.
Some states, like Michigan, forbid buying seeds during the pandemic as it deemed gardening supplies and “non-essential” items. Most communities are not that extreme and have lifted such regulations.
Even so, it’s good to check with local ordinances before you start planting.
What’s the first thing to do in starting a backyard garden?
The first step anyone planning a backyard garden should take is to determine their climate zone. Most gardens should be ready to plant after the last frost but that comes at different times for various climate zones.
Knowing your climate zone will also help you pick the right plants and seeds that will grow well in your area.
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Do I need a lot of tools for a backyard garden?
You don’t need a lot of tools but need some specific tools, especially if you are going to put a garden in the ground.
A tiller is a must. The ground must be turned and doing it by hand is too hard.
You will need a shovel, a hoe, and a garden rake. You should also get some gloves and make sure you have watering planned out. That can include catching and using rainwater, a long hose, a sprinkler, or an irrigation system. It needs to be figured out before you plant anything.