#76. Vegetable Gardening Is a Joyful, Healthful Way to Play*

Some doctors, for good reason, prescribe gardening instead of drugs.

The author’s rhubarb patch, April, 2025.

Dear friends,

I’ve been a vegetable gardener pretty much my whole adult life, so it’s fun to see research revealing its benefits. Perhaps you’ve heard of the “Blue Zones,” areas of the world, identified and described by Dan Buettner (2010), where people regularly live into their nineties and even hundreds. They include Ikaria, Greece; Okinawa, Japan; Ogliastra Region, Sardinia; Loma Linde, California, and Nicoya Peninsula, Costa Rica. According to Buettner, vegetable gardening is a major activity in all these areas and may be a key to their long lives.

Buettner is quoted (by McPhillips, 2020) as saying in a podcast: “In all Blue Zones, people continue to garden even into their 90s and 100s. Gardening is the epitome of Blue Zone activity because it’s sort of a nudge: You plant the seeds and you’re going to be nudged over the next months to water it, weed it, harvest it. And when you’re done, you’re going to eat an organic vegetable, which you presumably like because you planted it.”

As Buettner explains, gardening is a great source of exercise. It entails the regular, daily, natural sorts of movement that keep our bodies running smoothly. And it provides the fresh fruit and vegetables that we all know are good for us. There’s also evidence that gardening is a great stress reducer and improves mental well-being.

Research Showing Physical and Mental Health Benefits of Gardening

In an experiment in the Netherlands, participants who regularly gardened were given a frustrating, stressful task and then were asked to spend the next 30 minutes gardening or reading. Those in the gardening condition overcame the stress very quickly, as measured both by self-report and a physiological index, while those in the reading condition did not (van den Berg, 2011).

Much other research shows that simply being outdoors in nature, or even being exposed to growing plants indoors, can relieve stress and hasten healing in people who are ill (Thompson, 2018). Another study, of people over age 62 living in an urban area, compared those who had been assigned an allotment garden with their otherwise similar neighbors who had not received such an allotment. Those with a garden reported fewer physical complaints and greater psychological wellbeing than did those without (van den Berg, 2010).

In still another study, in the twin cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, participants rated their level of emotional well-being during 15 different presumably enjoyable leisure-time activities, and gardening regularly came out among the top three (Ambrose et al., 2020). It was right up with bicycling, walking, and eating out. The researchers also found that vegetable gardening promoted well-being more than did ornamental gardening and that vegetable gardening was the only activity that promoted well-being even more among low-income participants than among those with higher incomes.

Recently, I came across an umbrella review—that is, a review of reviews—of research pertaining to the mental and quality of life effects of gardening, which included 40 research studies of various types, including controlled experiments, correlational studies, and observational studies (Pantiru et al., 2024). The authors note that not all the studies were of high quality, but enough were to provide convincing support for the conclusion that gardening has beneficial effects “on measures of mental well-being, quality of life, and health status.”

What Vegetable Gardening Does for Me

I started vegetable gardening in 1972, right after I had started my university position, and have been doing so every year since then, with the exception of a few years when I lived in a forest with insufficient sun for a vegetable garden. Here is what gardening does for me.

• It gets me out of the house into the fresh air and sunshine nearly every day, from at least early April (when I mend the fence, add compost to the soil, and plant the earliest crops) through December and sometimes later (as I harvest turnips, rutabagas, and other root crops protected under layers of mulch and often snow).

• It’s an endless source of meaningful exercise. Spading, weeding, raking, mulching, and the like are equivalent in exercise to what some people pay for at a gym. And the exercise is meaningful because it produces something. It doesn’t just spin a wheel or cause weights to go up and down in the air. What a joy to watch a sprout come from a seed, then a full plant from the sprout, and then, from the plant, the tomatoes, beans, cucumbers, or …. It’s magic.

• It teaches mindfulness; I must pay attention to my immediate world when I garden.

• It teaches patience; I hoe, plant, weed, and wait and wait and wait to see what happens.

• It teaches the futility of perfectionism. There’s no such thing as a perfect garden. Some plants make it beautifully, some barely make it, and some fail dismally; and there’s no predictable pattern from year to year on how this works out. This is life.

• It provides an endless source of puzzles to solve, as I strive to outsmart the various animals that try to rob me of my crops. In the process I’ve learned a lot about the local fauna and nature’s deterrents.

• It greatly improves my diet. I had no idea, before I grew them, that I would so enjoy kale, broccoli, chard, turnips, and rutabaga. Vegetable gardening has made it easy to become a vegetarian. The garden vegetables and fruit are so good I no longer have a taste for meat. Because some crops store through the winter, we (my wife and I) eat from the garden essentially every day. I’ve also learned to grow salad greens indoors during the coldest months.

• Last but by no means least, it appeals to my natural frugality. Free food! To be honest, that’s why I started gardening, in 1972.

And here is a gardening tip that not everyone has heard of. I’ve found that a dilute spray of rotten egg keeps deer from eating my plants. I mix one egg in a half gallon of water and let it rot as my stock. Then, to spray, I dilute some of that with water, at about 1:10, in a small hand-held sprayer. At that dilution, I can barely smell it. Even so, I avoid spraying against the wind. It’s important to remember to spray after every rainfall. I use this on my fruit trees, berry bushes, and any other crops grown outside the portion of my garden surrounded by an 8 ft fence. (A young buck learned to leap over my 3-foot fence, so I added five feet of netting on top of it.)

Further Thoughts

Consistent with a theme of Play Makes Us Human,, I should add that gardening is play for me because I control it. I plan it, manage it, do it on my own time in my own way. When I was a kid, about eight to eleven years old, my parents had a garden primarily to keep grocery expenses down, and one of my chores was to weed it regularly. I didn’t like gardening so much then, because the garden wasn’t mine and I didn’t control what was planted or how it was managed. Much of the difference between play and work lies in the freedom to do things your way. If you want your kids tto garden, let them grow their own, in their own way, if they are interested. Don’t try to manage it or them. The same applies to your spouse! Give advice only when asked.

Gardening may or may not be your preferred route to exercise and mental peace. If it is, I would love to hear about it in the comments below. If something else is, I’d love to hear about that also. If you hate gardening; well, OK, share that too. This substack is, in part, a forum for discussion. Your questions, stories, and experiences add to its value for everyone.

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With respect and best wishes,

Peter

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References

Ambrose, G., et al. (2020). Is gardening associated with greater happiness of urban residents? A multi-activity, dynamic assessment in the Two-Cities region, USA. Landscape and Urban Planning, 198, 1-10

Buettner, D. (2010). The Blue Zones: lessons for living longer from the people who’ve lived the longest. National Geographic Books.

Pantiru, I., et al (2024). The impact of gardening on well-being, mental health, and quality of life: an umbrella review and meta-analysis. Systematic Reviews, 13:45. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13643-024-02457-9

Thompson, R. (2018). Gardening for health: A regular dose of gardening. Clinical Medicine, 18, 201-205.

van den Berg, A. E. et al (2010). Allotment gardening and heath: A comparative survey among allotment gardeners and their neighbors without an allotment. Environmental Health, 9, 74-101.

van den Berg, A., E. & Custers, M. H. G. (2011). Gardening promotes neuroendocrine and affective restoration from stress. Journal of Health Psychology, 16, 3-11.

*Note: This letter is a slightly revised and updated version of a blog post I published a few years ago at Psychology Today.