Painless Organic Gardening

Photo courtesy of _CitizenKane_ at Flickr.com.

While any gardening, organic or otherwise, is going to require some physical activity, you don’t have to suffer excessively for your art. You can make your gardening efforts into healthful activity instead of a painful irritation by following a few simple steps.

Start with some stretching exercises to loosen up your muscles instead of jumping right into your gardening session. Next, ramp up your activity gradually, especially after being inactive all winter; rather than spend eight hours working in the garden the very first day, start slowly with only an hour or so of bending and digging. If you begin well before planting season by cleaning up your garden and getting it ready for spring, you won’t have to try to do all your clean-up work and planting at once. Pace yourself, so that you can avoid painful sprains or repetitive motion injuries. Similarly, you can cut down on those back injuries by doing two simple things: instead of bending down to pull weeds, use a hoe, tiller, or similar long-handled tool to get rid of them when they appear, and lay down a thick layer of mulch to keep them from coming back easily.

You’ve probably been told a thousand times to lift with your legs rather than your back, but most of us forget this when in action — so we’ll repeat it here. We also recommend that you keep a gardening stool with you at all times, so you can have a seat whenever you plan to spend a lot of time in a particular area. This can help you save your energy and reduce the strain on various muscles.

When it comes to tools, be sure you have the right ones for the job. Using a hand-trowel to weed when you should use a hoe isn’t going to help your back any; similarly, using a hand-pruner on your tree branches when a large by-pass cutter would work better wastes time and energy, and may damage the hand-pruner to boot. If you’re using a long-handled tool like a hoe, make sure the handle is long enough that you don’t have to bend over too much. If you’re using edged tools, make sure those edges are sharp, to cut down on the effort required to use them.

Finally, consider creating raised beds for your gardening. Not only do they look nice, you don’t need to bend nearly as much to maintain them, and you don’t have to worry about as many weeds.