August 6, 2011
I grew up in the Korean War era as the daughter of an enlisted Air Force father, with both my parents’ families living in Michigan. And both had gardens. 
[here’s a site with some great garden blogs… http://www.invesp.com/blog-rank/Gardening ]
My father’s parents lived in town and when you stepped outside the back door and turned left, you came to Grandpa’s garden… Row upon row of carefully tended fresh produce…including tomatoes that Grandpa picked and offered with a sprinkle of salt and a smile… We would both bite into our red ball and let the juice run off our chins…grinning at one another. Then he would pick tiny little cucumbers and we would repeat the same ritual… salt, bite, less juice…big grin.
My mother’s parents lived on a farm. The barn. The hay wagon. The cows that got milked… 
Flowers and flower bushes growing along the house, along the field, and in clumps dotting the mowed lawn. All things that fed into my ideas about gardens.
So it is the time of year when I am picking cucumbers from my own garden. I have harvested some tomatoes with more to come. And I have been enjoying flowers all summer long…
And I am catching up on some reading.
Prevention magazine in June 2011 had a headline: ‘JUST 5 MINUTES of gardening improves both self-esteem and mood [p. 19]. I read further and learned that an article published in “Environmental Science & Technology” reported these results. I wanted to know more… this turned out to be harder than I expected.
I went to the journal site…punched in gardening effects on mood, since Prevention magazine did not name researchers or an exact issue in which the research appeared. This kind of source-layering has been discussed here before… I was surprised and a little annoyed that I couldn’t find the study being reported so I could consider the evidence leading to the magazine’s conclusion. I read it in Prevention magazine which might be good promotion for them… or not — depending on whether a reader is willing to just take the magazine’s word about what the research concludes and how such conclusions were reached. It did get my attention but led to me asking: based on what?
After some time and leaving the journal site to just search Google more broadly, I found another article reporting about the research: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/es101129n. It appeared May 15, 2010 in the journal on p. 3649 and was written by Robin Meha. She summarizes the research that Jules Pretty and Jo Barton did leading to the conclusion that just five minutes… FIVE MINUTES of gardening improves mood… http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20337470 .
And that is why I like to garden so much….
