🌿 I lift weights regularly. I walk lots. I ride my bike. And I’ve been doing anti-gravity yoga.
🌿 Still, last weekend Sarah suggested we rake up and bag some leaves, tidying up the garden for spring. Leaf pick up day was Tuesday.
🌿 All good. Except after sitting down to read that evening, I got up and ouch, my back. It’s not just the garden that needs to get in shape for spring. Apparently, it’s me too.
🌿 Gardening is tough work. Instead of the occasional binge, I might try to do some regularly during the week.
I’m writing this on the start of my vacation. That might seem a little mundane, but for me it’s a Big Deal. Five months ago I started a new, permanent job, returning to an industry I had left behind to have kids and go to school. The past six years or so, I have been working interesting and fun, but unstable (and underpaid!) jobs on contracts. It is not lost on me that having paid time off (PTO in the business world) is a tremendous privilege, and I am thinking about how to best take advantage of this privilege.
Truth is, I’m really tired, after throwing myself head-long back into a career I had left twenty years ago. It has been awesome and it has been intense.
Happily, I am having a pretty relaxed vacation and excited to have my whole family come visit me in Ontario from British Columbia. We will spend a lot of time at southwest Ontario’s beautiful beaches and do some city-tourism.
A lo-fi photo of my meditation spot in my garden. Gardening always makes me happy so it was the perfect place for me to start!
I am thinking that this vacation is also an opportunity to re-start a regular meditation practice. I started meditating out of necessity (for my mental health!) early in the COVID crisis, when I was really struggling. I found peace by doing simple meditations with an app, in my beautiful vegetable garden.
I subscribed to the app so I had more choices, and I meditated regularly and even followed a few “courses.”
These days, though, “post” COVID as we seem to say, I haven’t taken the time to meditate. I miss it. So I am declaring here that I’m going to restart! Hold me to it, if you are so inclined readers. I can use the accountability :). Really though, I am ready for it.
If you’re like me your annual interest in gardening just kicked back in. I’m not a gardener… I don’t pour over seed catalogs in the winter, I don’t draw out maps of what my garden should look like or put too much thought into what varietals I want to plant each spring. But when my friends start talking about their garden, posting pictures of early blooms and cursing about the vicious bunnies who eat their new buds…. Well, I get FOMO (fear of missing out).
A couple weeks ago that FOMO feeling settled in and I started talking to my partner about what we should do with our front yard. I’ve long lobbied to pull the grass up and make it something pretty. Some friends have done a lot of research into pollinator gardens and I absorbed some of that knowledge through conversations with them. Suddenly we seemed to be in agreement on what to do, and poof – the grass was gone. Just kidding… it was hours of hard work, all of which was blissfully done by my partner.
It seems I’m not alone in getting the garden bug around this time of year. The National Garden Clubs, Inc. has designated the first full week of June as “National Garden Week” and The National Wildlife Federation has declared June to be National Pollinators Month. Noting that pollinators are crucial in supporting our food ecosystem, the National Wildlife Federation notes that pollinators are responsible for 1 of every 3 bites of fruits and vegetables we consume!
Our work-in-progress pollinator garden
Thinking beyond fresh food consumption, gardening itself can offer a lot of health benefits. National Day Calendar recognizes June 6 as National Gardening Exercise Day, and says gardening is not just therapeutic but also builds muscles. Activities such as weeding, planting, pruning, and mowing offer natural forms of exercise and strength building, along with stretching and flexibility. Exposure to sunlight and fresh air also offer health benefits by increasing our Vitamin D and boosting our immune systems.
National Calendar Day also recognizes June 13 as National Weed Your Garden Day. This day, they say, is intended to remind gardeners to take an extra 5 or 10 minutes to weed the garden(s). My informal survey of gardening spouse and friends reveals that weeding is not considered a fun activity, but it does provide a chance for lots of good movement with all of the stretching and bending involved.
While National Calendar Day isn’t able to provide the origins for either weeding day or gardening exercise day they do offer some reasonable sounding suggestions for getting started and managing this type of movement (https://nationaldaycalendar.com/national-gardening-exercise-day-june-6/):
1. Start slowly. Just like any new workout program, small steps.
2. Use the right and left hands equally. When raking or shoveling, switch hands every 5-10 minutes to give each side a good workout.
3. Make sure to breathe. Deep, cleansing breaths bring oxygen to those working muscles.
4. Lift with your legs! When lifting, bend your knees. Don’t lift with your back.
1. Committing to regular weeding to reduce weed growth.
2. Weeding after a good rainfall while the soil is soft makes it easier to clean by the roots.
3. Weeding your garden with a friend to makes the job go faster and feel more like a celebration!
4. Rewarding yourself with tall glass of something iced and refreshing as you admire your weed-free garden.
How about you – have you been bitten by the garden bug or are you just enjoying your neighborhood blooms?
Amy Smith is a professor of Media & Communication and a communication consultant who lives north of Boston. Her research interests include gender communication and community building. Amy spends her movement time riding the basement bicycle to nowhere, walking her two dogs, and waiting for it to get warm enough for outdoor swimming in New England.
Well, here I am back for my monthly update. This month I also didn’t make it to the aquafit classes that had me so motivated to write for this blog, back in February. I have continued to have many extraordinary things on my plate. In addition to looking for permanent work, I have reengaged with academics in a way I didn’t see coming and I have found deeply satisfying. I am also an avid vegetable gardener, and spring is a season of much work.
So this month, as I realized I wasn’t chiseling out the 3 hours to get to the pool, I made some different choices. I was already active in the garden, so I started paying closer attention to my Fitbit and aimed to get my heart rate up and keep it there. Guess what? It worked! I was able to sustain a cardio heart rate while digging and raking. I also made an effort to walk my dog at a pace I would ordinarily have avoided.
This is me in my happy place – the garden!
A few weeks ago, I read something about how when people are very inactive, the key is to get active in tiny steps. I felt quite reflected in that post. For most of my life, movement – especially brisk physical effort – was not my friend. When I could avoid it, I did. This year I can feel that shifting, and I’m finding some joy in the grind and the sweat. Hey – I’m 51! It turns out it’s not too late.
SO, I’m not sure when I’m going to get back to the pool. I *think* I am going to have time this summer, and it really is fun to do aquafit in an outdoor pool. But I know that my garden is full of vegetables needing tending. And I know that I am leaving (tomorrow!) for a solo camping adventure at Pinery Provincial Park.
This is my dog Finn. Walking him as made a real difference in my life and my relationship with activity. He made himself this bed to lie in while I garden!
I’m trying to hold to the belief that my body is mine, to use and enjoy and sweat in as I please. To remember that hey, it’s kind of fun to work hard sometimes. And to remember that small activity is activity, and for me that’s really something. I was fascinated to read that Diane also gardens and sees the fitness value of it. I was also really, really pleased to notice that this past month, as I got more active, my hips hurt less. Honestly, I’m kind of excited now about this little journey I’m on. Thanks for tuning into it.
