Gardening is state of the art. It is quite an out of box topic to grow your terrace garden in the modern era with a busy-bee lifestyle and living under concrete roofs. Terrace gardening is the urban future. Just imagine your roof top-loaded with lots of greens and veggies, and most importantly, you harvest the veggies you eat. Isn’t it fascinating?
No matter the terrace’s size, let’s kick start a simple terrace garden initially and then grow it to a bigger one with innovative methods. Here are some reasons to inspire you to setup a terrace garden.
1. Cut the cost
It is usual to buy locally available meat and vegetables sold in markets for day to day cooking purpose. Most of them will be chemically treated, and if you go for an organic one, it will be too costly. Moreover, people have an unhealthy lifestyle by eating junk foods even though it is over-priced because of its taste. But when you grow your terrace garden, you will be fascinated about the harvest and stick on to a healthy lifestyle. If you inspire your children to plant greens at home, they will not be patient enough to wait to eat their efforts as they have planted the seeds in the field. Starting to grow your veggie garden will also help children create the necessary mentality towards healthy foods and inspire them to eat healthy food spontaneously from a young age. It will cut the cost of unnecessary junks in food.
2. Grow your health
Yes, the most prominent justification for starting your garden is that vegetables grown in your garden are organic with hassle-free chemicals and pesticides sprayed on grocery items. Also, new ingredients bring more flavour to your meals and have greater nutritional value. There is nothing quite interesting like crunching a fresh carrot or making a delightful veggie soup from freshly plucked vegetables. It should also be known that terrace gardening is one of good outdoor activity. Exposure to sunlight will increase vitamin D levels in the body, benefit your bones, and boost immunity.
3. Fantastic hobby
In life, gardening makes you more motivated. It encourages the mind and body to think in imaginative ways to achieve a result, while gardening sounds like a passive practice. Planning your garden with the space available and designing a good theme and selecting suitable plants to grow will allow you and your family to stimulate the mind to develop innovative design ideas for your project. It, in turn, keeps your body stimulated and involved by discovering the necessary equipment, working on the soil, planting, watering, pruning, fertilising and harvesting.
4. Environment-friendly
The plants minimise emissions, improve the overall air quality and breathability in the neighbourhood and contribute to a general improvement in the residents’ wellbeing. Such terrace designs often ensure regular contact with nature, which decreases mental stress and tension significantly. Growing fruits and vegetables in such gardens usually ensure that residents eat sufficient quantities of nutritious greens.
5. Gardening, a sport
Research suggests that spending one hour on reasonable gardening practices such as planting and weeding will burn 200-400 calories, but intense works like setting up of the garden, carrying heavy soils etc. will burn more calories which is equivalent to an intense workout,
Best of everything, it makes you more target driven as well. Going to the gym and doing the same exercises will be fascinating during the initial days, but you will probably be bored due to monotony activities. Unlike exercising at a gym or going for a walk or running daily, terrace gardening will make you goal-oriented and more purposeful because at the end of your exercise you want to do more than just losing calories-you want your garden to flourish. So for the mind and body, there is exercise.
6. Sense of Purpose
One notable feature of gardening is that it will have a sense of intent for you. It is a way of taking care of something and nurturing it from a small seed to a large plant. Often, when the plants take root and begin to grow, this is enough to give you a sense of purpose and pride. Whether you take on more significant projects with large plants or something smaller like keeping a houseplant safe, it doesn’t matter, and the feelings are the same. To support this sense of intent going, you can grow plants all year-round.
7. Connect with Good Bacteria
In this hyper-cleanliness world, we have washed off the healthy bacteria that prevented infections by frequent use of sanitisers, soaps, etc. One surprising advantage of gardening is that it gets you right up close with a host of healthy bacteria again. Several studies indicate that strains of bacteria contained in the soil of your garden can induce the secretion of serotonin from your brain, and this is the feel-good chemical that can help combat depressive symptoms. Mycobacterium vaccae, present in the soil, is one such bacteria and gives off the beautiful earthy scent when it rains. You want to take in this bacteria when you do gardening, which impacts your immune system by making your body less vulnerable to inflammation. This is a principle called the Hypothesis of Hygiene. This philosophy also implies that there is a correlation between your immune system and your brain. At the same time, gardening will help strengthen both.
8. Stress buster
In a contemporary multitasking environment, it does not go by where we are stressed. It can take its toll on extended hours of work, long hours of focus and concerns about achieving deadlines, caring for the children and getting through that maddening traffic every day.
Different studies have shown that gardening is an effective stress reliever that is far more productive than other outdoor activities. In reality, nature’s sights smell, and sounds take our mind off the concentrated attention and lead us to a more relaxed and effortless concentration state that brings out a positive mood swing.
9. Improve Your Self-Esteem
Your self-esteem can weaken with your hectic schedule. It is particularly true if you have never gardened before and are not sure whether you will be good at it. One advantage of gardening is that it’s a natural and fast booster of self-esteem. You are planting your seeds, water, weed, and your garden is fertilised, and you are watching it grow. Your self-esteem will also increase as more plants start to develop. It feels incredible to undertake new activities, and gardens provide you with endless possibilities to learn new skills.
Aww-struck reading the benefits of terrace gardening…!! Gardening needs a heart to work on; let’s take a step towards better tomorrow, start living and loving greens, and believe in tomorrow. Nurture your dreams with nurturing your terrace garden.