Container Gardens Provide Physical and Emotional Benefits

Container gardens offer more than beauty and convenience. Since gardening is also a physically and emotionally rewarding pastime, container gardens provides the means of engaging in this healthy activity and is available to millions of urbanites and to those for whom conventional gardening is not an option. In our fast-moving, stress-oriented lives, it is increasingly difficult to justify taking time to exercise or to relax and "de-stress" ourselves. Fortunately, planter gardening is not only a productive, useful pastime, it also combines mild exercise with relaxation and pleasure, and so it can literally transform your life.

Physical Benefits
1. Planting, watering, fertilizing, and harvesting plants are all much healthier activities than TV watching and other pastimes performed in a semi-comatose state.
2. Growing fresh, safe, organic herbs and vegetables helps reduce your intake of toxic chemicals that permeate so much of the food we buy.
3. If you are a senior or are physically challenged and find that caring for a plot of land is beyond your scope, you will appreciate garden planters. You don't need a backhoe to prepare the soil and there is very little weeding and maintenance.
4. If you are confined to a wheelchair, container gardens can be raised to an accessible level.
5. When you are busy and rushed, the need to deal with the bugs eating your tomato plants forces you to drop those mind-numbing dusting and vacuuming chores and engage in the creative task of tending to your garden crisis. (And the busier we are, the more we need these kinds of excuses.)

Emotional Benefits
1. Psychologists have long understood that nature has a calming and healing effect, which means that gardening provides emotional benefits for stressed and unhappy people. As well, if your backyard, deck, patio, or balcony offers water and colorful flowers and shrubs, you will attract wildlife even in a city, and each day, you can thrill to the visit of a songbird, a humming bird, or a butterfly. (Plant it and they will come.)
2. There is pleasure in nurturing a little plant from a seedling to a lush flowering charmer.
3. There is a sense of accomplishment in providing food for the table and stunning beauty for the eye.
4. A rich environment feeds the senses and brings you joy – the touch of soil, the sight of showpiece blooms, and the perfume of flowers and herbs.

If you have no ideas about how to use or hanging baskets, we have wonderful web sites that provide all the information and pictures you need to design, plant, and maintain your gardens. Also online are recipes for cooking with herbs, guides on how to use them in herbal remedies, and how to plant everything from small trees for natural shade to juicy strawberries for making pies.

Creating container gardens is a wonderful learning experience. I've done everything wrong at least once: filled a hanging container so full that soil and water poured out all over me the first time I watered it; watched shade plants wilt in the sun and sun-loving plants droop in the shade; killed plants with too much water and not enough; struggled to hang a heavy ceramic planter before it occurred to me I had better leave it on the patio floor; planted bulbs upside down; and watched crack when the temperatures dropped. Today, my patio is alive with vibrant flowers and trailing vines in fiberglass urns, and there are flowers cascading from hanging baskets overhead. I'll be drying and bottling my abundant herb crop in the fall and I'm waiting for my first tomato to ripen. Anyone can learn how to garden successfully.

Enhance your enjoyment of nature and of life. Even if you are an apartment or condo dweller, as long as you have a patio, a deck, a balcony, or even a sunny window ledge, you can reap the rewards of container gardens, large and small, many or few. Smile as you crumble a fresh herb into your vegetable casserole, gaze out at your inviting outdoor living space, and reflect on your transformed life. You can do it!

About the Author:
Scott Gray is currently a garden enthusiast and freelance writer who enjoys providing tips to consumers who are in the market for all types of .