Gardens A Retreat From The Grind

With all the stress of daily life it is important to be able to get away for a little bit and to stabilize yourself . Gardening has become a major stress reliever for millions of people. You may not think of gardening as relaxing when you think of digging and pulling weeds but it really is. When you are gardening you are out in the fresh air and exercising. This alone will make you feel better. It is amazing how a little work can pay such benefit to your body and soul.

When you are out in the garden your mind tends to wander away from the day to day worries and you get involved in what you are doing. Your problems and cares are still there but they are put on the back burner for a little while. While you are busy working on the garden you are able to slow down and relax not be under pressure to get to the next appointment or to finish an assignment you are there to enjoy a little time away from all the rush.

You may not be doing a whole days worth of work in the garden it may only be a 15 minute get away to snip a few branches or to just loo around. But even a 15 minute break can help clear your mind and relieve some stress. The real secret is in letting your self be able to enjoy the time away from everything else.

Yesterday I was wandering around spraying weeds at the urban garden in the sidewalks and curbs. As I was passing by some of the beds I noticed some cone flowers coming up. This was not an earth shattering thing but even to this day I am amazed at how this fascinates me. You see these were volunteers and they must have come from seeds from a bed several hundred feet away. As I was investigating I found that the cone flower bed had also gotten a few new residents from the Coreopsis bed a few dozen feet away. It was like I said not earth shattering but it was a diversion that took me away from what I was doing and a little break that took me to a different thought from the weed spraying . It is just something about being in the garden that makes you spend a little time seeing things that are there but that you may pass by a dozen times without really seeing it.

As I get older it seems like I really am getting worse about my time management. I was never really great at being right on time and now I tend to still resist a ridged schedule. When I am involved in something it is a little hard for me to walk away from it until I have completion. I do have a tendency to go back to what I was doing the previous day and finish before I tackle the next group of work orders that come in. This is not maybe a flaw but maybe a way of being brought up. The bosses always walk by and if they see something like some weeds in a bed they fire off a work order. Well yes there was some weeds they saw but also a lot they did not see. They would have been satisfied if I would have pulled the 6 or 8 weeds out they saw and then thought the work was done but of course I wanted the 40 small weeds gone then I need to edge the bed and re-mulch it to make it look fresh and well tended. It is just they way I was trained that if you are going to do something then invest the time and do it right. Three weeks from now the 40 small weeds would have grown up and I would have gotten a new work order. Course the 5 minutes to pull a couple of weeds turned into an hour and a half to really clean up the bed but it felt like I had accomplished something and in the long run would not go back and redo the same work in a couple of weeks. While I am working on the bed I tend to forget about the other work orders and I am concentrating on what I am doing that is a stress reliever .

So while you may not disappear in the garden for an hour and a half even 15 minutes away from what you were doing is certainly a break from what you were doing. When you go back you will feel a bit more refreshed and relaxed. That is what can happen when you let yourself just wander for a few minutes each day.