Gardening is good for your mental and physical wellbeing. It’s a gut feeling shared by many people who enjoy digging in the dirt. But a new CU Boulder study backs up that sentiment with science.
University of Colorado-Boulder professor Jill Litt recruited nearly 300 would-be gardeners from the Denver area for the trial. Half of them were paired with community garden plots from Denver Urban Gardens. The other half made up the control group.
Researchers followed the participants over the course of a year and found the gardening group reaped a host of benefits along with their harvests. They ended up eating more fiber – consuming the fruits of the labor - and getting more physical activity – walking to and from the community gardens, and the gardening activity itself. Both are important measures for reducing risk of chronic diseases like cancer and diabetes.
Litt says the gardening group also reported reduced levels of stress and anxiety. “What we hear in the qualitative interviews is that they feel relaxed,” Litt said. “They dial in to that acoustic landscape, the birds, the breezes. The sensations on their skin working on the soil. They talk about the stress just rolling off their shoulders, getting their hands dirty, forgetting about their problems, forgetting about things that are upsetting them. And they're building social relationships,”
That social relationship building is why Litt says working a plot in a community garden is most beneficial. However, she says home gardening has some of the physical and mental health benefits, too.
“I think of [gardening] as a stealth health intervention. People do it because they love it, and if they love it, they probably stick with it. And by the way, it has a benefit that you might start to eat better and you're probably going to be a bit more active and it might reduce your stress and anxiety,” she said.
Litt hopes her study will encourage more support and funding for community garden projects. “I would like to see the landscape of health care shift, where gardens become a part of the system of the kinds of interventions that it's a legitimate health expenditure,” she said, calling for investment in gardens because they are “a public health strategy [with] health benefits.”
