Gardening Can Reduce Stress

 Credit to: DailyMail

Planting a beautiful garden can be a great way to relive stress! Whether you have a small patio to decorate, or a vast amount of space to tend, the act of making your particular stretch of nature into a haven can be a stress reliever in itself, and the garden that you create can bring you even more peace. Here’s why:

  

Getting In Touch With Nature: Being in touch with nature and the great outdoors can help you feel more removed from the stressors of daily life. With the amount of time we spend indoors (at work, watching t.v., etc) many people feel an urge to connect with nature that goes unfulfilled. While you may not have the time to go camping or take a nature hike each day, having your piece of nature right outside your back door can help you feel some of this connection. Gardening Without Stress and Strain

Creating Beauty: The beauty of nature is a great stress reliever in itself. (Just think of how many times relaxation has been connected with pictures of stunning landscapes or recordings of nature’s sounds.) Having your own bit of beauty available as a place for meditation, contemplation and relaxation can provide quite a bit of relief from stress. It’s all part of making your home a haven from stress.

Sunlight: Just getting out in the sunlight can actually improve your mood! (In fact, there’s a condition called Seasonal Affective Disorder that affects some people during Winter months when there is less sunlight.) Sunlight also provides an influx of vitamin D, and the fresh air that that goes with it is good for your health. Getting outdoors to work with your garden is a great excuse to get more of this good stuff.

Raises Self-Esteem

Gardening requires hard work and dedication. The reward for this effort is a great sense of accomplishment and increased self-esteem. Gardening fosters optimism from watching plants grow throughout the season and seeing the fruits of your labor develop into food. The delicious fruits and vegetables harvested give gardeners the opportunity to share them with family, friends and neighbors. A successful growing season provides a great sense of achievement. 

Physical Activities and Sensory Stimulation
Gardening provides a variety of exercise for the body. Muscles are developed through digging, lifting and raking. Walking, weeding and mowing can accomplish aerobic activity. Best of all, the focus on gardening tasks makes exercise easy. Dump Your Stress in the Compost Pile: Stress Reduction Through Gardening

Landscapes are a wonderful way to observe nature. The garden landscape helps connect you to the natural rhythms of the seasons and natural cycles. Growing colorful flowers and ornamentals allows for creative expression in decorating and art. Cooking garden produce brings creativity into the kitchen with fun and nutritious meals to share with family and friends.  Source : CDCG, About.com

Make Money Growing Rooted Cuttings and Selling them Wholesale

Once you know how to effectively propagate landscape plants, you will soon have more rooted cuttings than you can use. At that time you can decide whether or not you should quit growing cuttings, since you have all you need, or maybe you like to sell some of your cuttings to a wholesale grower. 

Let's discuss how easy it is to start a business selling lining out stock. That’s what nurserymen call the little plants that they buy to plant out in the field or in containers. Lining out stock, or liners for short. 

“Nurserymen buy plants?” You might be asking. 

Yes they do. Nurserymen probably buy more plants than any other group of people in the country. Why would they buy them if they know how to grow them? 

Because sometimes they can’t grow them fast enough to keep up with the demand. Or maybe they would like to grow a certain variety of plant, but can’t grow it themselves because they don’t have any place to get several thousand cuttings. So what they do is buy in rooted cuttings, plant them in the field or in containers, and then they either grow them on to sell, or they grow them on and just keep them around a year or two longer so they can take cuttings from them. 

Then once they have a supply of their own plants they can sell the ones they bought in, that are now landscape size. Does this make sense? 

Let’s say that Mary the nursery owner buys 1,000 Variegated Weigela rooted cuttings @ 50¢ each. She plants them in the field in the early spring and they take off growing like crazy. That summer she goes out and takes 3 cuttings from each plant (They need pruning away, right?). 

She sticks those 3,000 cuttings under intermittent mist and in about 5 weeks she has 3,000 rooted cuttings that she can plant out that fall, and she does just that. The following summer she can get about6,000 cuttings from the original 1000 plants that she bought, plus another 9,000 cuttings from the 3,000 she planted out last fall. 

That’s a total of 12,000 cuttings. 

She continues to plant her rooted cuttings out in the field and keeps taking cuttings from them until she has all she wants to grow. From then on she can take as many cuttings as she needs from the plants that she has in the field.

By now the original 1,000 plants that she bought @ 50¢ each are large enough to dig and sell, and they are worth $10.00 to $15.00 each wholesale. That’s $8,000 from a $500 investment, plus she can produce as many variegated weigela as she wants without buying any more cuttings. 

 

Does it really happen this way? Yes it does. I was recently talking to a friend who grows and sells all kinds of plants and he told me that he has been buying Dwarf Alberta Spruce cuttings and growing them on and selling them. He doesn’t even root any himself, he just buys 5,000 every year, pots them up and sells them wholesale. How many other nurseryman across the country do you suppose do that? 

To get started you can either buy a stock plant or two, or buy several hundred cuttings of the variety that you would like to sell. Instead of planting them out in the field, I would plant them in beds. Make each bed 4’ wide so you can reach the center to weed and take cuttings, and place the plants in the bed 10” apart. 

As long as you keep taking cuttings the plants will remain fairly small, and compact. Then after a two or three years dig them up, put them in pots and sell them. By then you will have thousands more coming on that you can take cuttings from. Start out slow until you know what there is a market for.  Gardening Articles