Let's garden!

You have probably already noticed that when you spend more time in nature, you feel tired afterward in a different way than you do after an ordinary day working in an office. People often describe it as a kind of “pleasant” tiredness that leaves us feeling calmer and sleeping better.

Gardening itself can often be like a form of therapy, and you can almost enter a meditative state while doing it.

One of the best things about it is that we can involve the children at any time - in a way that suits their age, of course. This way, they not only help, but also take responsibility for the plants they have planted; keeping them alive can even become their specific task. Caring for the garden can quietly become part of their daily routine, even if only to a small extent.

Try seeing what happens after a major argument if you go outside to work in the garden together. At first, you will probably just prune away in silence next to each other, but after a while you will find yourselves no longer even remembering what you argued about.

That is because gardening is also a great stress reliever. By focusing on the task at hand, becoming completely absorbed in it, and relaxing, we consciously or unconsciously shut negative thoughts out of our minds. We create something beautiful and new, and not much can compete with that, can it? It is no coincidence that you can read or hear so much about the healing effects of gardening.

Seeing something we planted begin to grow and bloom, and perhaps even being able to eat it, can give both us and the children a huge boost in confidence. It can improve our self-esteem because something we make an effort to create becomes visible and tangible.

Of course, it is worth finding out first how to make our gardening genuinely useful and effective. It does no one any good - neither us nor the plants - if, full of confidence but with no knowledge whatsoever, we start cutting back branches we think are too long, or decide that living bushes and flowers have dried out and should be removed.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with not knowing how to do it; in fact, it can be great fun when the whole family learns something new together - a kind of family team-building activity.

Together, you can decide what to plant, which things you can keep alive without too much hassle, and which ones, once you start growing them, could even make your everyday lives easier.

Just think how wonderful it is to have your own little vegetable garden, containing the vegetables you would otherwise have to get in the car and drive to a shop, market, or somewhere else to buy. They certainly will not be full of chemicals, and you will know what you are eating. Maybe not everything will look perfect, and your broccoli will not shine from a distance - but store-bought broccoli should not either... A huge advantage of food picked from your own garden is that you can harvest it when it is truly ripe, and it contains much more genuine nutrition than its store-bought counterparts.

Of course, you do not have to plant things that you will eat; it is more than enough to grow flowers, bushes, and trees, or care for the ones you already have.

Do you know why the flowers in our gardens can also make our lives easier? Apart from the fact that they are beautiful, of course. How often does it happen that we suddenly realize we need a few flowers for preschool/school/a visit? And if they are needed for preschool/school, we often only find out that morning, because whoever needed them “forgot” or “thought they had already mentioned it...”. At times like that, how nice it can be to simply go out into the garden for a few roses/tulips/whatever and carry on with our day without any trouble. Right?