A Guide to Alternative Medicine: Garden Therapy

Garden therapy is a loosely organized alternative medical treatment that attempts to heal your problems by exposing you vitamins provided by the sun and the lovely fragrances provided by your garden. A healing garden lays a second coat of alternative treatment upon the methodology by urging you to grow vegetables and healing herbs that will improve your overall health.

No major study has yet been produced to tie working in the garden to an improvement in any particular condition, but garden therapy has thousands of years of anecdotal evidence to support the contention that getting outside can make you less sick and prone to further illness. Garden therapy actually contains a selection of different concepts that converge together to promote better health. Getting out into the sun does expose you to Vitamin D that you may not get elsewhere. Tending to living creatures can stimulate the brain as well as your emotional state of being. Depending on the type and extent of gardening you do, there is the potential for getting exercise that you would not if you sit inside the house resisting the temptation to start a workout program. Those who experience Seasonal Affective Disorder are exposed to the light which can lift their foul mood and take away the source of their depression. The plants themselves provide a boost of fresh oxygen in a symbiotic relationship that develops between you and them as you gives off the carbon dioxide they crave. Even the soil can contain nutrients that are beneficial to your state of being.

Of course, that very soil could be what is making you sick. You should always have your soil checked for nutrient levels as well as whether it contains acidic or alkaline levels that are contributing to poor health rather than stimulating good health. Like the song says, the air you breathe has an effect on the health you exhibit.

Starting small like with an herb garden or just one or two vegetables is a good way to introduce yourself to this alternative medical treatment. Starting small lends you a sense of control that you may be lacking in the rest of your life and that is helping along your bad feelings. Eventually you can work up from a container garden or a window box garden to a garden that provides you with the vegetables and fruit you have begun including in your new, healthier diet.

Among those items to consider for raising in healthy garden as part of garden therapy are vegetables like carrots, spinach, kale and mustard greens that are high in beta-carotene levels. Brussels sprouts, green peppers, broccoli and cantaloupe can provide you with health doses of Vitamin C.