Back to the Garden: Why Gardening Nourishes Body, Community & Soul

Among my greatest achievements: eating something from my hillside garden or surrounding wild land nearly daily for 45+ years.

Miraculous: ground beneath feet → plants → us → bones, blood, tears.

We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion year old carbon,
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden.
—Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young

Any other activity serving as many individual/community needs as food gardening?

Why Do We Love Gardening?

Consider:

• Burns calories, builds muscle, strengthens bones, improves mood.
• Necessity teaches cooking; many become skilled.
• Studies show gardening eases depression, calms anxiety.
• Rare activity including all family ages together—promotes family well-being.
• Natural classroom: children learn natural world, contribute to household economy.
• Builds community: private gardens beautify neighborhoods; community gardens transform vacant lots, reduce crime, build bonds among nurturers.
• Fosters learning, teaching, sharing—connections among friends/neighbors.
• Home gardens/orchards reduce community trash costs: kitchen waste, leaves, clippings, debris, ashes → compost/mulch.
• Stronger individuals, families, communities strengthen national security as effectively as military—maybe more.
• Connects us globally: food production is the only essential human activity. Crosses culture, race, ethnicity, religion, disability. Gardeners worldwide share common "culture" and language connecting us when words fail.

My large, productive food garden is messy, humble—no glossy magazine cover. Don't romanticize the work: hard labor, discipline, skill, faithfulness. Requires knowledge/competencies but delivers mysteries beyond facts/science.

Human life—my life—depends utterly on soil-sun-green leaf alchemy. All great organic cycles repeat endlessly in the garden.

Ground Yourself

Innerly, my vegetable garden grounds me. Intensely physical: direct soil contact, hacking hardpans, hauling rock, turning compost, spreading mulch.

These concrete activities healed raw psychic spaces. Powerful grieving, raging, crying, shrieking, celebrating among cabbages and onions.

"Food will win the war"—WWI/WWII slogan. Victory Gardens: patriotism symbols. Home gardeners conserved war resources, filled agricultural labor gaps. Gardens gave emotional/spiritual strength to home front.

Beyond good dirt (or tubs of potting soil), hand tools, seeds—home food producers need little equipment. Intensive plot yields 10× conventional garden.

Psychologists say many Americans struggle imagining futures. My vision: This spring, 1.5× roasting peppers, 100 strawberry plants, 1000 onion seedlings, half the tomatoes. That simple.

~ By Margaret Boyles