It has been a sad week. Kim and I have been grieving the loss of her mother, Pam. We each have gone about it in our own way, coming together often for hugs and tears.
To reflect and grieve, I have been practicing gardening therapy, which is something that I discovered a while back. It always helps me get over the blues or a funk that I sometimes get into.
What did I have to lose by thrusting my hands into the soil and by getting stuck into planting more veg or harvesting our winter crops? Nothing to lose at all, and everything to gain, especially a sense of fulfilment and joy that one rarely experiences from other endeavours in their life. Well that is how it affects me.
Gardening Therapy
During the show I mentioned a study that may go some way to explaining why gardening helps combat depression and aids in mental health. It studied allotment gardeners asked to perform a stressful task and how gardening work lowered their stress levels quicker than a control group where were asked to read after the same task. According to the authors, gardening elicits powerful neuroendocrine responses that relieve acute stress parameters in a very measurable way. Very interesting indeed.
So please join me by listening to this episode titled Gardening Therapy, and hear how I have been busy getting therapy in my own special way.
Hey Gavin, great post, glad to hear you are working through your grief… my thoughts have been with you, Kim and your family.
Terry’s Chocolate Oranges (you can get them at the supermarket!) are delicious- a chocolate that pulls apart like orange segments, tastes like orange… winner! (though doubt it is fairtrade!).
Also- olive oil spray- just check your’s is only olive oil, I learned recently the reason mine has been staining my oven trays is because it has an emulsifier or corn flour or something that makes it go on white… just not sure how that would go on chook legs….
Anyway, great work and hope to catch you in zucchini season!
Cheers Kellie. My olive oil spray does the same thing to oven trays. I don’t think it will be an issue with the chooks though. The oil is just to starve the leg mites of oxygen, so as long as the other ingredients are edible, it won’t matter.
I will save a couple of zucchinis for you! x
Oh please make your own olive oil spray, it is so easy you’ll kick yourself and wonder why you’ve ever bought the stuff. I did a blog post on it in March when I did the 31 days of MOO challenge and it has been one of the most requested MOOs I’ve ever done .
You will need:
Misting/spray bottle (I suggest a new bottle for this, you don’t want one that has contained MOO cleaning solutions)
Oil of your choice (I use olive oil because that’s the oil I like to cook with most)
Water, boiled, distilled or filtered
Step 1. Mix 1 part oil to 4 parts boiled, distilled or filtered water.
Step 2. Pour into your spray bottle.
Step 3. Shake well each time you use it (because oil and water don’t mix, or at least they don’t stay mixed).
Step 4. Use it. Spray it on grills, in cake tins, in frying pans – wherever you would normally cooking spray. It makes fantastic fried eggs, without the extra fat and kilojoules.
My cakes never stick, the pans clean up beautifully and don’t have that yellow sticky stain on them, it’s brilliant. Best of all, you know exactly what’s in it – oil and filtered water – and even better it is so much cheaper than bought sprays. My bottle holds 200mls so it costs around 40 cents to make the equivalent of a can, saving around $2.50! With the amount of cooking and baking I do that’s about $25 a year I’m saving just on cooking spray (and $25 more I have to spend on my garden 🙂 )
I have a bottle of spray olive oil I’m using up and I noticed one of the ingredients is propane! I don’t know if it’s actually mixed into the oil but it is listed as an ingredient. YUK! Thanks for the hint!
My garden is my therapy and was suggested to me by a psychologist to combat the stress of being a double carer. It has saved me from depression so so many times. I am feeling your grief guys and cant imagine losing my mother so please give Kim and extra cuddle from me.
That is brilliant Lynda. I just wish more stressed out people would take up gardening. It works so much better than the quick fix of a pill. x
Oh i take those too. That’s why im so UP and delirious all the time. LOL Who knows, a few more successful crops and i might be able to give them up.
Hi Gavin, my thoughts are with Kim and yourself at this very difficult time in life. Everyone deals with grief differently, I found thinking of the happy days before my mum passed away gives me a warmness instead of dark clouds.
You are right about the garden. After my husband left (after 30 years) I bought a little house with just grass front and back. Through the generosity of Freecycle people gave me cuttings. I joined Diggers and bought seeds. I have a garden flourishing. I am still learning, but I love seeing how it changes everyday. It gives me immense pleasure and has helped me cope with the loneliness. I have found gardeners are a really friendly bunch of people.
Hey Gav, I’ve got a honeydew for you too. 🙂 Also, if you want to use up a glut of zucchinis, grate and freeze it and then you can chuck it into spag bol and all sorts. Also, lemon and zucchini butter (it’s interesting) and piccalilli pickles. 🙂
Let me know if you want a bag of goat manure and hay too for your compost heap. I need to clean my girls pen out (AGAIN!) so I have lots of hay and poo. It HAS to be composted as it will sprout otherswise from the hay seeds. We’d bought a roll of hay to find out girls turned up their noses at it! Snobs! 😉 Still, it spread around nicely to suck up the mud and such and it is chock a block full of the biggest fattest flattailed worms you’ve ever seen. 😀
Garden therapy is the best! I LOVE weeding. 🙂 Yeah, I know. Almost taboo to love it but I get to spend the time in the sunshine and lovely weather and with my hands in the soil. 🙂 It’s also time to think and plan for the future in the garden; what do I want to plant out next weekend, next month, which fruit trees to go where and so on. It’s the best time ever! In some ways I like pulling weeds more than I like planting out as there are more weeds and it takes longer and I get to spend more time in the garden that way. 😀
I’m glad you’ve found solace in the garden after the loss of Pam. She was a lovely lady and will be greatly missed. I am glad you have a place to be that will bring you solace from your grief. I hope Kim is finding peace in the garden too.
Thanks Jessie. Looking forward to your visit on Sunday! x
Looking forward to seeing you too. Guess I’d better go dig up that bag of manure and straw for you now. 😉 Seedlings and seeds are ready and waiting.