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Last Updated on August 19, 2021
If you’re looking to live life healthier and reduce your stress levels, look no further than your own backyard. Believe it or not, a well-cared-for yard can improve your mood and give you a space to rest and relax.
Essential Nutrients
A large majority of Americans have agreed that landscaping can help them have a nice yard and one way to get your yard in tip-top shape is through gardening. You’re actually more like a plant than you may realize. Just like plants, the human body is capable of photosynthesis and uses sunlight to make sure you get essential nutrients, such as Vitamin D. In turn, vitamin D can help strengthen your bones and help lower your risk of many kinds of cancer including breast and colorectal cancers.
Promoting A Healthy Lifestyle
Gardening can also help your health by helping you sleep better, helping you maintain a healthy weight, and helping you build strength. You may not think so, but gardening is exercise.
Activities like cutting grass and raking may only be considered moderate exercise, but you can also do plenty of vigorous exercises, such as shoveling or chopping wood. Ninety percent of Americans have indicated they want to live in a home with lush grass, plentiful trees, and plenty of plants. While many of those folks wish a professional landscaper could help them, you can do many of those things yourself.
With the right tools, you can plant plants, plant trees, clean up your yard and get it looking great. Planting trees isn’t something you need to do every day — in fact, a tree planted in an urban area lasts about eight years — but if your property is looking a little bare, you can plant trees that will eventually grow and add a little extra something to your property.
Keeping You Sharp
Another way that gardening can promote good health is by protecting your memory as you grow older. Gardening not only keeps you active physically, but it can keep you strong mentally, especially if you’re really into gardening and like to do things a certain way. If you know, for example, that you like to have one kind of flower planted 12 inches apart and another planted six inches apart, that sort of attention to detail will make your backyard beautiful, but it will also keep your mind working.
A Source Of Calm
When you’re feeling down, gardening can be the perfect mood booster for your health. Simply put, when you’re out in the garden, you feel happier. It can also help calm you if you’re feeling stressed. So if you’ve had a tough day at work, get outside with your gardening tools and spend a little bit of time digging in the dirt.
Endless Ideas
One of the biggest ways gardening or landscaping work can help your health is that it allows you a chance to let your creative juices flow. If you want to plant trees, start a garden, or create a garden walkway, you can do just about anything your mind can come up with.
Let’s say, for example, that you want to create a garden walkway. You can easily complete that project by using wood pallets. If you’re looking to do it on a budget, go for used pallets which run about $5-6 each. New 48″ by 40″ pallets are about twice that much.
Once you’ve got your pallets, you can excavate the area where you want to put them and lay them down. This helps drain water from the path you lay down.
Get Out There And Garden
If you’re looking to give your health a big boost — both mentally and physically — get outside and get to gardening. By spending time planting and gardening, you’ll get exercise, you’ll get a mood boost and you may even feel extremely relaxed.