Our garden blooms across 128 pages of our 2020 Garden Guide. By perusing its pages, you’ll step into our world, tap into your imagination, and escape from the cares and concerns that we all deal with daily. Within moments, you will begin to experience and enjoy the health benefits of gardening!
It’s true: Plants—flowers, vegetables, bushes, trees—are a pleasure to behold. You relax and become calm almost instantly in their presence. Stress melts away as your eyes and attention turn to a plant’s color, form, fragrance, and feel. Your focus on these features improves your visual and tactile acuity and just might make you feel younger—much younger! All of this from just looking! (Here’s an idea: As you look through these pages, see if you start to relax. Of course, if you suddenly feel inspired, excitement is acceptable!)
When you work in a garden, the feel-good factor increases dramatically. Did you know that 1 hour of raking, digging, and moving stones burns almost as many calories as an hour of light jogging? Add seeding, weeding, and watering, all while walking, bending, kneeling, squatting, pushing, pulling, and reaching, and you’ll get a full-body workout—and love every minute of it. Gardening produces a chemical reaction in your brain that improves mood. Gardening makes us happy!
Then there are the other benefits: sunshine, fresh air, bountiful harvests, and companionship—with like-minded folks, certainly, but also with birds, bees, butterflies, squirrels, and countless other creatures. Not to mention a well-earned good night’s sleep. So, again: Welcome to our garden! Relax, enjoy, and grow well!
Remember: Life begins the day you start a garden. What are you waiting for?
Janice Stillman
Editor
The Old Farmer’s Almanac Garden Guide
Pssst: Share your garden! Show us on Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest what’s growing on with you. Thanks!
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