Welcome to Naked Sustainability Podcast. This bold podcast helps busy millennials navigate real-life sustainability with practical tips, no-nonsense advice, and a zero-fucks-given attitude, all through a transparent and authentic lens of living in the real world. Join Ginny for lively conversations, expert interviews, and hilarious anecdotes. From eco-fashion to zero-waste living, we’ll empower you to be an eco-warrior without compromising your badass lifestyle. Get ready to kick some eco-ass.
Learn about all the amazing benefits the planet reaps when we garden. From capturing carbon dioxide, to reducing your waste, and keeping you a little bit healthier, Ginny deep dives into how gardening can build our future in the latest episode of the Naked Sustainability podcast.
Hi Friends! Just another amazing Friday over here at Naked Sustainability, the podcast where we discuss living our busy lives as sustainably as possible. It’s Ginny. Today I thought we’d touch base on all the amazing benefits of gardening. We’re about to dig deep and share with you how gardening can do more for than planet than you think.
We all know that gardening, specifically for fruits and vegetables, can save you a shitton of money, and the fruits of your labor taste absolutely fucking delicious. If you don’t know this, stop everything you are doing, go to a Farmer’s Market and try some of that sweet, fresh produce.
But how exactly does it help save the planet? It’s simple: one seed at a time. I have known since elementary school that plants take in carbon dioxide and release the oxygen that we breathe. But call me fucking crazy, because it literally took me twenty more years to realize that plants can help us fight climate change. These green goddesses work their magic by absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and turning it into something useful! Carbon dioxide is one of the major greenhouse gases that is massively contributing to climate change. When I made the connection, my mind was absolutely blown.
Plant something, save the world? Well, we probably can’t go that far, but it’s definitely a start.
If you’re even a little into gardening, you know about the goldmine known as composting. Yes, you can buy compost, but that becomes so damn expensive after one purchase, that you have to minimize costs somewhere. And making your own compost by turning your kitchen scraps into caviar for your garden plants is a good way to minimize your costs. You were just going to throw out your kitchen scraps anyway…why not throw them into a bucket and reuse those nutrients to feed your wonderful plants. No need for any synthetic or chemical based fertilizers. Composting is a super easy way to start reducing your waste and is super beneficial for your garden.
Gardening also helps with water conservation, and storm water management. With more and more urban areas giving rise to flatter landscapes with limited trees, shrubs, and plants, any sort of rain water ends up in the ditches and sewer ways, and ultimately water treatment plants that have to chemically treat and process the water. The plants in our gardens and yards can naturally process and treat that water, using exactly what they need to grow, produce fruit, and multiply.
Stormwater runoff ultimately ends up in a streams, lakes, and rivers and this runoff carries pollutants and chemicals to those bodies of water. Disrupting the ecosystems and environments of everything that calls the water home. When you utilize more of your stormwater runoff, it doesn’t get the opportunity to pick up various chemicals, pollutants, plastic bags, or other waste before settling in that lake you love to swim int. When you use the water at home, it has a limited ability to become contaminated.
We actually capture a lot of our rainwater from the gutters on our home and utilize this throughout the growing season for our garden and native plants. They don’t tend to thrive when we have to water them from our well, which goes through a water softening and treatment process before the plants receive it.
Now let’s talk about biodiversity. Gardens are like exclusive parties where all sorts of amazing and magical creatures are invited. Having plants blooming throughout every season, as well as plants are native to your specific area invites all sorts of pollinators and beneficial insects into your yard. It’s not just about the bees, it’s about all the insects—as much as I’m not a big bug person. Embrace those ladybugs, lacewings, and lightning bugs. They’re beautiful, they have an ecological purpose and they are VIPs that much on those quote, unquote pests in your garden. Keeping your fruits and veggies thriving without any sort of chemicals. Invite more bugs into your yard and you’ll be maintaining a natural lifecycle of soil health, plants, insects, and birds. I promise you’ll have less pests and diseases on your plants, and you won’t need to use any harsh chemicals to enjoy your wonderfully harvested fruits and veggies.
A side story, we stopped mowing our yard super frequently about four years ago. I was tired of spending so much time and energy mowing. We were actively cutting down the random flowers that were popping up in our yard. Our soil was rock solid and impossible to plant in, and the mosquitos were getting out of hand. Not to mention, I told the Boyfriend that I missed seeing lightning bugs. We have a two-acre yard and actively stopped mowing about a third of it to save some time, and we have ended up with native yarrow and violets all through the portion of our yard that doesn’t get mowed. It’s absolutely beautiful. We see so many pollinators, not just bees, all throughout our yard. We have lightning bugs again! It really does pay to not mow your grass as much because lightning bugs love to hang out in tall grass. We have less mosquitos that bother us, and we have a bunch of really pretty birds that come visit our yard.
We’ve been trying to restore nature to our small portion of the world, and—at least in small chunks—it looks like it’s working.
When you garden at home, you control exactly what goes on your food. No more chemicals, toxins…all of it basically organic. These chemicals and toxins don’t only effect the “bad” bugs known as pest. They can also kill or severely injure the bees, butterflies, and other pollinators that come to visit your yard and garden. And when bird eat the insects that have ingested or touched the chemicals, the birds also have to deal with the chemical side effects. We don’t want these chemicals in our bodies, why would we want them on our food.
Gardening also has other benefits that help the planet in a more roundabout way. Gardening is a great way to boost both your mental and physical health. It’s like a natural self care regimen. Gardening is a great way to actively meditate…which is the only way some of us can meditate. I’m constantly thinking of like 900 bajillion things and meditation on a pillow and clearing my mind entirely is just not something I’m capable of. But if I need a stress reliever, or to focus on something else for a while…lemme just walk out to the garden and harvest some veggies or water the sweet potatoes, or even pull some weeds. I swear it reduces my anxiety and calms my brain the fuck down without me even having to think about it. Plus the act of nurturing your plant babies and seeing them bloom or produce fruit/veggies for your to eat is a confidence booster like no other.
And gardening is a freaking fabulous workout. The moves involved in digging, moving compost, planting, weeding are all some sort of ancient tai chi. I swear, every summer, muscles I didn’t even know existed feel the burn. And it keeps me active and feeling fabulous. Plus the sunshine provides amazing Vitamin D and is a massive happiness booster. Just be sure to wear an all natural sunscreen.
My favorite part about gardening, specifically for our fruits and veggies that we grow, is the self-sufficiency we are establishing. Not only are we in charge of how our food is grown, and the lack of chemicals and fertilizers, we are in charge of our food kingdom. It makes me sooo happy to go an entire Pennsylvania winter without having to buy any potatoes, onions, garlic, or winter squash. We make enough pizza sauce every year that we can make pizza or pasta whenever we want. We never need to buy canned tomotoes or tomato paste. And while we still have to go grocery shopping occasionally, I’m confident it would take us a very long time to eat up our food storage and starve if we ever ran into a hard spot in life.
We love our garden-to-table eating style and it makes us so proud that we have built our own tiny sustainable food empire in our backyard.
So, my fellow eco-conscious friends, gardening is not just a hobby. It’s a fierce lifestyle choice that saves you money, saves the planet, nurtures your mind and should, and connects you with nature. Let me know what you’re growing this year.
There are so many more Earth benefits that are a result of gardening, but that’s it for today. Thanks for listening. Feel free to reach out at nakedsustainability.com. Don’t forget to subscribe, leave a review, and join us next week as we explore more badass ways to care for the planet, while living this busy millennial life.
Until next time.
