You already know that getting outside and getting your hands dirty is good for you. After you’ve planted some veggies, flowers, or even a larger tree, the feelings you get are positive. The hard work is done, whatever sweat it took is behind you, and now you get to marvel at your accomplishment.

But that isn’t the only thing that soil is good for! It turns out that some of the stuff in that dirt is not just good for our plants, it’s good for us, too. A research team studied the environment on the International Space Station and found that the highly sterile surroundings and the lack of microbes may be a contributing factor into astronauts getting more immune-related health issues such as rashes and cold sores. The research may lead to future space environments including more ways to introduce microbial communities to simulate our habitat here on Earth rather than a sterile lab. It made me think of the book and movie, The Martian, where the character Mark Watney (played by Matt Damon) is stranded on Mars during an emergency evacuation, and he survives in part because he is a botanist and figures out how to create dirt that can grow potatoes on Mars. 

It’s so counterintuitive, isn’t it? For many of us, the idea of getting dirty seems unhealthy and a good way to make us more ill. But not only is there this recent research about astronauts, but there is long-standing research that some of the bacteria found naturally in soil acts like antidepressants! Which is just one more reason to get outside and garden.

When you garden, you burn calories and get exercise. When you garden, you forget about all of the things going on in the world around us. When you garden, you get to pay attention to you and to make your outdoor space uniquely yours and beautiful for you to enjoy.

So we hope that you’ll join us this Saturday for our Simple Landscape Design seminar. I’ll give you lots of tips and tricks for creating a beautiful, manageable landscape. Then you can take all of those ideas home, along with a car full of plants, and get your hands dirty and soak in those beneficial microbes. Your landscape will be gorgeous, and you will have done some important work on your personal health. Forget “an apple a day keeps the doctor away” – digging in the garden every day keeps the doctor away is more like it! Happy Gardening and Happy Spring!