Hobbies play a crucial role in shaping an individual’s personality and provide a way to engage, learn and entertain oneself. There are many hobbies that people enjoy, cooking, singing, dancing, and painting are popular among all. Nonetheless, gardening as a hobby is also quite popular among people of all ages.
Farming & gardening as an occupation have been known to us for centuries, however, these days some people choose gardening as a hobby to grow their favourite flowers, vegetables, and plants. This way they spend time doing something interesting, benefiting them mentally and physically.
There are many health benefits of gardening as it involves labour and provides a sense of accomplishment when you plant, water, or care for plants. It helps you to reduce stress and anxiety levels and provides you with a way to relax.
Let’s move forward and learn some amazing advantages of gardening.
The Healing Advantages of Gardening
Researchers chose 2 groups to analyze the advantages of gardening. One group was assigned to look after their garden, and the other to read books.
It was noticed that the Cortisol levels were lower in both groups, however the gardening group outperformed the reading group. Their cortisol levels were quite lower than the reading group.
Note: Elevated cortisol levels can be a cause of excessive stress and anxiety. Maintaining a balanced cortisol level is beneficial for physical and mental health.
Gardening as a Hobby For a Better Health
Gardening involves shovelling, tilling, watering, trimming, etc., these exercises burn calories and help you remain fit. Moreover, they lower the risk of diabetes, heart disease, and other ailments.
Gardening on a sunny day gets you exposed to sun rays, which lowers the chance of getting skin cancer. Apart from these benefits, gardening helps you with better breathing and improved eyesight.
Gardening as a hobby has many other physical benefits.
Developing a Relationship with Nature
These days we spend much of our time on smartphones and computers, accumulating a lot of screen time. Especially, teenagers spend a lot of time on their smartphones, browsing short videos, playing games, and viewing social media feeds. Gardening as a hobby can provide them with an escapade to grow a relationship with nature.
Apart from being beneficial, gardening also benefits nature and its denizens. Garden provides birds, insects, and animals with shelter and a source of food, which helps in maintaining ecological balance.
Becoming a Nature Lover
Using an organic way of gardening and growing local varieties benefits the ecology. Moreover, keeping your garden weed-free, growing native species of plants, and keeping a check on invasive species benefit the environment.
Your little contribution towards your garden can motivate others to grow a garden and conserve the environment.
Gardening & Knowledge
Gardening allows you to learn about plants, insects, birds, soil and things related to it. Teenagers can take advantage of this opportunity and gain knowledge about all these things. Moreover, they can learn how to grow and care for plants and flowers.
Furthermore, school or college-going teenagers can apply their learning in their gardens and showcase the results to their peers to motivate them. This will help them in their academics and also motivate them a way to pursue their career in botany, geology or any other similar field.
Types of Gardening
If you are a gardening enthusiast, you may want to experiment with your garden style. However, to style your garden you need to have good space. You can beautify your garden by choosing mixed gardening by planting plants, flowers, and herbs of different varieties.
If you have enough space, you can also choose to grow grasses, bamboo and bonsai. Nonetheless, terrace gardening is an option if you don’t have space near your house. You can grow creepers, flowers, vegetables, and herbs in your terrace garden.
Gaining and Sharing Knowledge
For beginners, joining gardening communities to gain gardening knowledge can be beneficial. They can interact with gardening enthusiasts, share their thoughts, and get inspired.
Teenagers love to spend time on social media, they can share their gardening ideas, journeys and thoughts through their posts and engage with like-minded people. Moreover, they can inspire others to choose gardening as a hobby.
Challenges in Gardening
Sometimes, gardening can be challenging, especially for beginners. As a teenager, you may need guidance and assistance. You need to learn facts about the plant you have planted in your garden; plants are susceptible to weather conditions and pest infestation. Therefore, having a proper idea about how to look after them is necessary.
The web can be helpful to gain knowledge about plant varieties that you want to grow. Moreover, you can seek the help of online communities to share your issues and get insights on resolving them.
Furthermore, the local botany or forestry department can help you with any issue in your garden. From information on soil profiles to controlling weeds and pests, they can help you with all these.
Conclusion
Gardening as a habit for a teenager can have many physical and mental benefits. Moreover, it can help the local species to flourish and asylum to insects & birds.
Gardening not only helps you in your well-being but also gives you products like flowers, fruits, vegetables and herbs.
However, apart from its benefits, gardening can also have challenges. As a beginner, one can face many issues, some of them include pest infestation and weather-related problems. With the help of gardening communities and information available on the web, one can resolve these issues.
For teenagers, gardening can provide an opportunity to connect with nature, and a way to gain knowledge about flowers, fruits, herbs and vegetables. Moreover, it can also motivate them to choose a career in gardening, botany or any other related field.
Tanu Bhardwaj