Here’s what the gardeners on our team use to nurture healthy plants and, in turn, their mindset when life gets tough.
When I started my outdoor home garden, our little family was fresh off a complicated move back to a state I wasn’t sure I wanted to live in yet. It was a tumultuous time of feeling very unsettled, incomplete, and just plain unsure.
We had moved many times before, but this was our first with a baby. We were also caring for a sick dog that had to be put down much too young. I was grieving our pet and a former version of our life.
Building my outdoor garden was a small way of taking control of my environment when I couldn’t control much else.
A few years later, the space continues to teach me lessons. It doesn’t always go the way I want it to. It often requires more work than I have time for. Yet it remains a place to experiment and to find focus. It serves as a reminder that I can do hard things.
If you, too, are considering gardening (house plants count!) as a way to nurture your mental health, these are the home gardening essentials that have strengthened my inner gardener. I also pow-wowed with two other editors on our team who use gardening as an antidote to trying times.
Healthline editor Kristin Currin has turned to gardening as she faces an empty nest.
“As a single mom, I’ve shifted my nurturing, doting, and desire to control to my plants,” she says. “It’s given me a hobby, an outlet, a catharsis, and a sandbox where I can help influence an outcome.”
She gives all her plants creative names (because why not?) and says she feels grounded when she gets her hands into the soil.
Veronica enjoys the challenge of choosing unhappy plants to take home and rehab. She has a knack for it. Her advice often enters our team’s group chat to save other editors’ plants. All of her now thriving plants were the most unhappy ones at the garden center.
They get a new life, and they give something back to her, too.
“There’s something meditative about wandering around the house, checking leaves and soil, gently pruning away dead flowers and stems. Plant care is repetitive, especially if you’ve got multiple: fill with water, set to drain, tip out the excess, repeat.”
Tips for starting an outdoor bed
- I did the old-fashioned thing and asked my husband to build me a garden bed. I have since come across these corner blocks, which make it really easy to attach 2×6 wood planks together.
- Choose a raised bed soil mix. Sometimes you can find this from a local farm near you that’s mixed to cater to your local climate. But there are good organic premade mixes, too.
- Use a soil volume calculator to determine how many cubic feet you’ll need (the soil can be an initial investment).
- Research what grows seasonally in your local area to determine what you can plant in any given month. Based on the month and the plant, you can either start seeds indoors for later transplant or sow directly into your garden bed.
If you’ve got a gardening bug, go with it, but don’t overthink it. Start small, choose one or two things to grow, and see what happens. A few basic tools will get you started. If it doesn’t go well, stay the course, and remind yourself you can do hard things, too.