How Gardening Helps My Cancer Journey

I was about halfway through my six rounds of chemotherapy, with winter and its cold and gloomy days soon to accompany my sometimes-gloomy mood when I decided that I wanted to plant a garden for spring.  Now I wasn’t quite sure what kind of gardening I wanted to do, flowers or vegetables, but I just thought it sounded like a good idea.  Google to the rescue.  It was there that I stumbled upon Nicole Burke from gardenary.co and my adventure began.

While researching gardening in my area I was also looking into healthy living for cancer patients.  I knew, as I think that we all do, that organic fruits and vegetables are healthy for anyone, and increasing your intake of fruits and vegetables is also recommended for a healthy lifestyle.  I decided to start with vegetables.  In the middle of winter.  Cue the seed packets, seed trays, warming mats, and grow lights.  I was all in.  The first win from gardening, growing organic vegetables that would nourish me and provide healthy nutrition for me.

I won’t bore you with the details of my first-year gardening successes and mishaps, but while I was going through chemotherapy, I loved tending to something other than myself.  Watching the seedlings sprout and grow gave me something small and manageable to do every day when most days the best I could do was take care of myself. It was a form of mindfulness which ultimately leads to stress reduction, another pillar of a healthy lifestyle.  Second win from gardening, giving me something manageable to do every day and providing me with a daily dose of mindfulness.

Once my seedling babies were big enough and the spring sun started to shower us with warmer days, I set out planting all those tiny vegetables in my seed trays into my bigger raised garden beds.  This required me to be outside for a small amount of time every single day.  I donned my hat, sunscreen, and sun protective clothing and out I went, taking in that beautiful vitamin D from the sun.  The National Institute of Health reports that the best benefit of being in the sun is that it helps boost the body’s vitamin D.  Vitamin D is vital in helping our immune system function and as a cancer patient, my immune system needed all the help I could give it.  Sunshine is also thought to increase mood and decrease depression.  Third win from gardening, helping my immune system and my mental health.

Four of the six garden boxes my husband made for me!

My gardening obsession also helped my husband through my treatment.  See my husband is a man of action.  He is not one to sit around and wait for things to happen and if something is wrong or broken, he wants to fix it now.  My cancer diagnosis and treatment were particularly hard on him because the best he could do was take care of me, which he did spectacularly.  But he couldn’t fix me.  When I told him I wanted to garden and I showed him Gardenary’s raised beds, he was all in.  Out to the home improvement store and my eight raised bed gardens were born.  Added win from gardening, it gave my husband something to physically do during my chemotherapy, a time when he, like most caregivers, feel helpless.

While I know that gardening isn’t for everyone, gardening provided a lot of benefit to me both during treatment and in the after cancer.  I was able to provide my body healthy, organic nutrition; it gave me something to do every day so that I felt like I had a purpose other than to get well which was daunting; it provided me moments of mindfulness where I could focus on something other than my illness; it provided me a daily reason to go outside and give my body vitamin D to support my immune system and mental health; and it gave my husband something to do so that he didn’t feel so helpless in my journey.  The biggest thing that gardening has given me though, is hope.  You see when you plant that little seed, you are sending a message that you intend the seed to flourish and grow and that you intend to be here to watch when that seed turn into a lush and glorious plant.  So, I would have to say that gardening has given me many gifts, but the greatest gift it has given me is hope for the future.