A recent study entitled “The Role of Home Gardens in Developing Cities for Improving Workers’ Psychological Conditions” was published in the 2022, Volume 6 of the Journal of Contemporary Urban Affairs. It offers a correlation based insight into the benefit of home gardens for a personal’s mental well-being and lower levels of stress.
Specifically, the study looked at how this played out during the COVID pandemic lockdowns in 2021 and 2022 where many outdoor and social activities were cancelled or even prohibited which greatly increased periods of isolation.
The study was conducted on Java Island in Indonesia from November 2021 until March 2022 primarily using online questionnaires. Their focus was to measure the psychological impact that the presence of a home garden and the activities performed there on individuals’ well-being / stress. The study authors defined a home garden as “a field that is large enough to give the ideal space for the individual or all family members and contains plants .”
In the end, the study concluded a strong value in having a home garden during a pandemic. In addition, frequency of visits and the duration of those visits were both shown to correlate with healthy mental well-being and inversely correlated with reported stress. An average of 5 visits per week of an hour each were determined to provide the greatest benefit.
Next Level
One thing that I think was missing from the study is taking into account whether people in their gardens were able to have contact (albeit with some physical separation) with neighbors or other individuals passing through the community. A completely secluded garden where an individual spends lots of time could have a significantly less beneficial impact than one where a person is positioned to have many micro-level interactions with other humans (even if they spend less total time in the garden or have a smaller garden than the former individual).