On Gardening

Ws2016 wrote: »

amusedmonkey wrote: »

As promised, here it is:

Are those the peas or the pods?

amusedmonkey wrote: »

As promised, here it is:

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.

Need2Exerc1se wrote: »

zdyb23456 wrote: »

We had several bad tries with squash which bums me out cause I love summer squash.

What was the problem with your squash. We have had problems in the past with powdery mildew but you can prevent that by spraying the plants with milk. It works better as prevention than a cure so I spray mine regularly from the time they are small. We haven't lost any squash since.

liftingwateringcan wrote: »

@Kamikazeflutterby... agreed! But planting some basil and marigolds by your tomatoes help. And seeing them while they are smaller helps with the shock/ jump back reaction when you see these nasty buggers!