7 Reasons Why Gardening Gets Harder As You Age
By Rabia Gul Khan
Author Bio: Rabia Gul Khan is an enthusiastic writer, who loves to read and write about new technology, fashion, design, health, and traveling. She is keen to pen down the latest information and knowledge to educate readers about new things.
Gardening as a hobby
Many plants or nature lovers adopt gardening as a hobby. They enjoy seeing their plants grow and treat them like their own babies. Gardening, like reading and playing, is the most beneficial hobby. These daily life activities help one to spend their idle time in some productive work that is good for them and those around them.
Gardening also channels positive energies inside an individual, as plants impact mood and mental health. The elderly are the most attracted to the hobby of gardening. The activities of daily life are a distraction for them to remove their loneliness.
The senior citizens find a friend in the plants and channel their inner creative instincts in grouping and raising the plants. However, as they age and their body loses energy, the elderly find it difficult to continue gardening as a hobby. Though it is hard for them to leave their pursuit, they reduce the time and effort they put into gardening.
7 Reasons why Gardening gets Harder as You Age
Those people who practice gardening know how strenuous the activity can be. The digging, sowing, and watering activities are more complex than they may seem. Many of them will choose to use raised garden beds to make these tasks easier. In your youth, these tasks may be nothing for you, but you will understand the energy they require as you age.
Unlike some other hobbies, gardening can be considered Age bound as one cannot practice it to the fullest later. Here is a list of reasons why gardening cannot be practiced at later Age or gets harder as you age.
1. Body strength
After the middle Age, the human body starts to become. This is the same for every human. No matter how good a diet you have or how hard you work on yourself, the human body is bound to become weaker with every passing day. The body loses energy primarily because organs and organ systems weaken.
As the body becomes weak, digestion and new protein production slow down. This weakens the muscles, making it hard to carry out vigorous activities. Gardening involves many active activities, making it hard for the elderly to continue. The digging is arduous and cannot be carried out by anyone with a weak body.
If they may continue to do so, they might damage their muscles with acute pain prevailing for some days. In worst cases, they might sprain some powers, which is very dangerous at later Age.
2. Prevalent diseases
In the 21st century, nearly every second person that crosses forty or thirty-five years of Age becomes a victim of diseases like diabetes, blood pressure, etc., that have many severe effects on the body. The patients require good bed rest and no strenuous activities to have stable health.
Gardening, on the other hand, is a commitment that requires your body to be in action to its total capacity. When you need to give more effort to it, you may find it irritable not to be able to work well with the plants.
3. Allergic reactions
The immune system of the human body weakens as it ages. This, again, is due to the lesser protein production as all the immunoglobulins are proteinaceous. As the immune system weakens, the body becomes prone to many pathogens attacking.
Plants have pollen and other components that act as a pathogen on weaker immune systems. Pollen allergies can lead you to be bedridden as they might cause breathlessness, rash, and violent coughing.
4. Joint pain
Due to frequent back and forth and bending and stretching, the joints start to ache. The aching can be short-term and less sharp at the Younger Age. However, at the later Age, joint pain due to posture while digging, carrying the carts, and sowing can lead to acute joint pain and, in the worst cases, bleeding, which is very critical.
5. Relaxing stage
The later stage of the human Age is the period of rest for the body. In this stage, the elderly want to spend their time in activities that are also significantly less tiring and more soothing. Keeping this in mind, it is hard to give your time and energy to gardening when other activities can also kill your time while relaxing and comfortable.
6. Cleanliness
Gardening is an activity where getting dirty is inevitable. The elderly are usually clean freaks and find it hard to take frequent showers as the skin is frail and can get dry enough to be cracked.
7. Pest attacks
Pest attacks are frequent in gardening. Recovery from such attacks is difficult at later Ages and may lead to certain permanent aftermaths.
