On Gardening

French_Peasant

FunkyTobias wrote: »

And this is in the debate forum why, exactly?

I thought it would generate more debate, or at least cat gifs. Feel free to upload some pictures of ducks.

Since it successfully promotes nutrition, fitness, and physical and mental health, I probably should have been more contentious and said "gardening is the single best activity you can do to promote all aspects of your health." I would expand that to small-scale farming, but not the kind of farming where you are spraying your migrant workers with pesticides.

lemurcat12

Tempted to make a Trump joke, but will restrain myself.

kshama2001

jmbmilholland wrote: »

FunkyTobias wrote: »

And this is in the debate forum why, exactly?

I thought it would generate more debate, or at least cat gifs. Feel free to upload some pictures of ducks.

Since it successfully promotes nutrition, fitness, and physical and mental health, I probably should have been more contentious and said "gardening is the single best activity you can do to promote all aspects of your health." I would expand that to small-scale farming, but not the kind of farming where you are spraying your migrant workers with pesticides.

I lost about a pound a week during gardening season last year. Slowed to about a half pound per week when it was over. Gardening rules!

lemurcat12

Eh, I'm just jealous. The ability to have a real garden is the only reason I occasionally consider the 'burbs.

kshama2001

lemurcat12 wrote: »

Eh, I'm just jealous. The ability to have a real garden is the only reason I occasionally consider the 'burbs.

My plentiful gardening space is why I put up with my landlord's nuttiness.

French_Peasant

lemurcat12 wrote: »

Eh, I'm just jealous. The ability to have a real garden is the only reason I occasionally consider the 'burbs.

You need a dacha, like the Russians, the little summer cottages where the country grows 40% of its food. Or at least a nice plot at "the lake," as we Hoosiers refer to ANY of the hundreds of lakes dotting our landscape, to the endless amusement of my East Coast colleagues who go to "the shore" (of which there is only one).

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2012/07/russian-summer/newman-text

Need2Exerc1se

I would be very sad without my garden, and likely very fat. It is my chief form of exercise and why, like you, I generally gain weight every winter.

Gardening is such a great pleasure to me. Not only does it supply a great deal of our vegetables and fruits but it's the best stress reliever I know of, except maybe hiking.

My garden is pretty organic. I compost our vegetable waste, fireplace ash, sawdust and wood chips from firewood and what I muck out of the chicken coop for fertilizer and rarely use pesticides other things like milk and teas.

I'm not much on growing things I can't eat though. All our flowers are wild or perennial except those I plant in the garden to attract or deter bugs.

Need2Exerc1se

jmbmilholland wrote: »

100df wrote: »

I have a small garden. Eating what I have grown is awesome. The pride tastes good! I eat more vegetables when I grow them. Sometimes I wish I had more people to feed so I could have a bigger garden. I can what we don't eat. It's great in the winter to have summer squash.

Other than steps I take, I don't log the exercise I get. I consider it every day activity. I move slow though. The days where it's a lot of work, I figure it's extra calorie deficit.

Mentally it's relaxing. I like providing fresh food for my family. If it's a good year, it really does save money. Starting the seeds in the house gets me through the end of winter and beginning of Spring. It's fun watching the plants grow.

It is a lot of work and can be disappointing when it doesn't perform well because weather or my lack of effort. Animals eating before I can harvest is really aggravating! Deer, bears and chipmunks enjoy fresh veggies.

I started with a small patch of blueberries. Now I have the blueberries, tomatos, potatoes and spinach. Fresh spinach is really something special. I have grown others but these seem to be the best as there isn't much waste and they perform well.

If you aren't sure, start small. If you don't have a yard or bad dirt use containers. A container, dirt and a plant or seeds wouldn't be more than $10. If you have a yard, you can easily plant a couple of seeds or plants. You don't need any equipment like a big shovel if you start small.

I can definitely sympathize about the animals--they are our bane! We have a dog, so the garden in our yard (1/4 acre city lot) doesn't get messed with, but our community garden (which is 7000+ square feet) is just a few hundred feet away, on the property of a church next to a large wooded area in the city, so we have an 8-pt buck and a few does that enjoy hanging out in the garden, along with smaller critters. We have it fenced, but the fencing is cheap and cobbled together, and apparently deer can carefully jump between strings up to 8 ft. We have found that we have to build mini-cages for the popular plants--strawberries, cabbages, lettuce, carrots, beets and beans, mainly. They don't mess with the potatoes, peppers, eggplant, rhubarb, garlic or leeks, but they will take a bite here and there out of the marigolds, kale, tomatoes and squash and pumpkin vines, but must not like them too much. Then there are the tiny critters that like to eat holes in the leaves.

I have also found diversity to be the key to a successful harvest--our tomatoes and squash were horrible last year, but our eggplants and leeks went crazy. It varies from year to year, but yeah, 14 eggplants were probably too many.

If you would like to expand, any foodbanks or pantries in your area would probably love to get fresh veggies. For our community garden, we give 10% or greater of the harvest to a local pantry. (They probably got sick of eggplants last year!) I have a bunch of seeds popping up right now and am shuttling seedling trays from the heatmats inside to my mini-greenhouse outside. My kids won't stick with a task for too long, but they each enjoy picking out a couple of packs of seeds and planting a few of them.

Deer won't jump a fence if there is nowhere to land on the other side. We secure our garden from deer with just a 5 ft fence by simply running a brightly painted 2x4 around the interior about 2 ft in from the fence. We attached chicken wire to the bottom of the fence and ran it around the outside to keep our burrowing critters, then covered it with mulch which means we don't have weeds within 2 feet of the garden perimeter.

I also deep mulch with hay so I rarely have to weed.

lemurcat12

jmbmilholland wrote: »

lemurcat12 wrote: »

Eh, I'm just jealous. The ability to have a real garden is the only reason I occasionally consider the 'burbs.

You need a dacha, like the Russians, the little summer cottages where the country grows 40% of its food. Or at least a nice plot at "the lake," as we Hoosiers refer to ANY of the hundreds of lakes dotting our landscape, to the endless amusement of my East Coast colleagues who go to "the shore" (of which there is only one).

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2012/07/russian-summer/newman-text

I've actually considered buying a place on the west side of Michigan (friends of mine have done that), and for a while my parents were even considering retiring up there (they ended up near Portland instead) and having a huge garden (and my dad kept joking about goats and chickens to annoy my mom). Of course, then I'd have to drive through your lovely state, and they always seem to plan the road construction to be especially irritating on long weekends or whatever weekend I happen to be going to Michigan. ;-)

Need2Exerc1se

moyer566 wrote: »

haven't started anything yet. I might have some blackberries and chives that have come back from last year, and maybe sage.

this year i plan on growing foods/flowers that my bearded dragon will eat. She loves berries and greens. She is supposed to eat some flowers too, so i thought I'd try that too.



I might try a salsa garden again too

Nice!

I grow kale and arugula in containers just for my chickens because those are their favorites. On days we aren't home and they have to stay in their run all day I'll put the container in there for them to much on.

Ws2016

amusedmonkey wrote: »

As promised, here it is:

Are those the peas or the pods?

amusedmonkey

Ws2016 wrote: »

amusedmonkey wrote: »

As promised, here it is:

Are those the peas or the pods?

Those are the pods, and they house 1-2 chickpeas each (look at the open pod in the middle). What's nice is when you roast them in pods you don't need to add any oil, the pods release natural oils so they never stick.

Ws2016

Woke up this morning and went outside to check my lettuce box.

justrollme

amusedmonkey wrote: »

As promised, here it is:

This looks so very delicious!

perkymommy

sistrsprkl wrote: »

I love gardening and plan to work in my garden this afternoon. I don't log any of my exercise including gardening. It's just all part of the healthy life I try to maintain. Here's to bountiful gardens for everyone this year! My dad just put a fence around mine so the deer don't mow it all down like last year

The deer have already gotten to our lettuce I told my husband yesterday we may have to put some fence around it this year so it doesn't all get eaten.

perkymommy

I have tracked it as exercise when I worked out in my natural areas around my house so far this spring. I would be sweating so hard and the next day I would be so sore I could barely get out of bed after working 2-3 hours outdoors, so you betcha I'm logging it in as a workout! Anything I work up a sweat to gets logged.

liftingwateringcan

justrollme wrote: »

amusedmonkey wrote: »

As promised, here it is:

This looks so very delicious!

This^^

I have a few raised beds that I am planting now... gardening it quite the workout, not sure how many squats I'm doing? But I love it!

liftingwateringcan

jmbmilholland wrote: »

I was getting ready to type a long comment about gardening on another thread with @GaleHawkins, but thought, it's such an important topic, it really deserves a thread of its own.

Just to give a little background, I have been a gardener since the bug bit me in high school. It wasn't until I had kids that I started to see my weight creep up, but in the summer when I was doing intensive gardening, I would lose 20 lbs or so through no additional effort (exercise, calorie counting), especially in the years that I was putting in a new garden or expanding a current garden (I have my home garden, formerly had a lake garden where my uncle is now building a house, and am intensely involved with a community garden). To give my most recent example, last winter my weight had reached 185 or so (not that I weighted myself very frequently, as it was so discouraging) but by the time I got completely fed up in late July and resolved to lose all the weight, I had already fallen to 168, and I would attribute most of that to hours spent in the garden.

Here are the calorie burns that Harvard Medical School gives for various gardening activities (counts are for a half hour at the following weights: 125 lbs/155 lbs/185 lbs)

Planting: 120/149/178
Raking: 120/149/178
General gardening: 135/167/200
Weeding: 139/172/205
Digging/spading dirt: 150/186/222

Here is the full report with many different activities listed: http://www.health.harvard.edu/diet-and-weight-loss/calories-burned-in-30-minutes-of-leisure-and-routine-activities

Anyway, while it's not going to give you the same burn as running or intense cardio, anyone who gardens knows that you can spend hours and hours doing some pretty intense work, and get a great core workout while spading potatoes or stacking straw bales or flipping compost. For me, 4 hours in the garden is a 1336 calorie burn for "general" work--and some days I will spend 8 or 9 hours between my two gardens. It is hard work, but I love having my hands in the soil and being out in nature, and the time just flies.

But wait...there's more! The activity level is just half the story. If you are growing a vegetable garden and eating from it, that is another huge boost for health. My background is in medieval literature, with a particular emphasis on science, medicine and agriculture (because it's not geeky enough to JUST be a medievalist). While researching the many and sundry famines and wars, I would marvel at how the average peasant was able to stay alive (many times they didn't) on so little sustenance. What is bad news for the peasant is good news for us--as a gardener, you expend so much effort in gardening, you will never reap those calories back from just the garden. MAYBE if you have a bumper crop of 100% potatoes, but even the Irish needed a cow to make that work. Grains are another basic staff of life, with corn being the superstar. If you're growing lettuce--forget about it. If you want an additional challenge, you can try to garden 100% organically, which makes things even more, um, challenging.

Finally, there are the therapeutic aspects of gardening. I did a quick scan of some of the lit (and by quick, I mean reading the first five headlines that popped up on Google Scholar) and saw a lot of references to nursing home horticultural therapy and then this very interesting social sciences report on incarcerated kids and their garden: http://juvenilerecidivism.yolasite.com/resources/Therapeutic gardening in a long-term detention setting.pdf

Gardening is a huge commitment and takes a lot of time, and I have seen a lot of people start enthusiastically then fall away when they realized how difficult it is. But if you enter it with the perspective that, not only am I gardening, but this is a workout that I am going to commit to, including hours of weeding while sweating under the hot sun, I think that people would find it to be a very rewarding endeavor, both in calories burned and nutrition (if not calories) reaped.

I'd love to hear thoughts from any other gardeners out there, as well as provide encouragement to anyone who may be considering starting.

@jmbmilholland Thanks for starting this topic!

zdyb23456

We've done a garden for about 8 years now. We started out small, 10ft x 2 ft. We expanded about 5 years ago to more than double.

We mostly grow the same few things - tomatoes, peppers (hot and sweet), basil, rosemary (it just keeps growing!), kale (in the winter), bush beans, 1 cucumber plant - I can barely handle all the yield from 1!

We eat and preserve just about everything. We grow a lot of basil and puree it with olive oil and freeze it so we can have pesto year round.

We had several bad tries with squash which bums me out cause I love summer squash.
Also, towards the end of the season the cucumbers get afflicted with tiny little worms or something. I guess it's ok because by then I'm generally pickled out.

Our yard is fenced in, but rabbits love to help themselves - I lost my entire bean crop last year to them. They ate every bean plant that started growing, then it got too hot to grow.

We've pared down this year since my spouse will be deployed all summer - he does the bulk of the work so I'm on the hook this summer. The pressure is on!

gentlygently

Was very pleased to come across this thread - and thought I had posted all about my gardening (a smallish front garden in London, but I still manage to squeeze in some fruit and veg along side the flowers and self built patios)... But it didn't end up being saved I think...so I try again another day...

Gardening is good excercise - for the heart, mind and body.

And eating that well deserved cake/healthy apple sitting in it whilst admiring your handiworkimproves the taste buds too...

My veggie seeds in and just just beginning to show (well the sweet peas that went in same time are, and potatoes happily cchitting). Great time of year!