by Jeffrey Pierce, MD
Welcome to the inaugural edition of Growing For Life, our monthly Love.Life Telehealth gardening series! Why are we talking about gardening in a Health & Wellness newsletter? Well, it turns out that gardening brings a whole range of health benefits to the gardener. From improved access to tasty, nutrient-dense whole plant foods, to daily physical activity, to the cortisol lowering and mood boosting effects of time in nature, the research shows that gardening is good for you and for those around you. During these short monthly articles, we’ll touch on a mix of the health benefits of gardening as well as what you can be doing in the garden throughout the calendar year.
As this is the first entry, I’ll take a moment to share a bit of my background in gardening. Roughly ten years ago, I practically couldn’t even keep a plastic plant alive. But with the help of my brilliant and talented wife, Mimi, I went from plant assassin to green-thumbed plant nerd. Over the last decade, we have slowly converted our city home and yard to an edible food forest, as you can see from the included before and after photos.
Bit by bit, we have taken over almost any possible space to grow food. We have planted directly in the soil (but not too much since we have really heavy clay soil that is like cement in the summer and a swamp in winter). We have built raised beds, planted into half wine barrels (which do abound here in Northern California wine country), and planted in pots of all sizes. I am a bit addicted to growing fruit, so we have many different bushes and trees that we keep small by pruning multiple times in a year and sometimes planting them in containers. We get out in the garden almost every day, not really because we have to, but because we love to. We are also thankful that we can eat from our garden 12 months of the year.
So now that you know a little more about our garden, let’s talk about what we can all be harvesting and maintaining in our gardens this month. The United States is quite a large place, with a wide range of growing conditions, so December gardening looks very different in Los Angeles than it does in New Jersey. So the first step is to know what your local community of gardeners does in December. I’m a big fan of the Master Gardeners programs established across the country. Wherever you live, you can search online for “master gardeners of [my city]” to get great advice that is pertinent to your area. Many of these groups have robust websites with information on what to grow for each month of the year, as well as ways to contact the master gardener volunteers directly via email or phone with your gardening questions. For us, living about an hour north of San Francisco, we have fairly mild winters. Our USDA hardiness zone is 9b; which means our average lowest winter temperature is between 25-30 degrees F (you can find your winter hardiness zone at https://planthardiness.ars.usda.gov/). We are therefore lucky enough to be harvesting greens, root crops, herbs, and picking fruits such as persimmons, pomegranates, and citrus this month. But even in cold zones, people are growing some hardy plants outdoors and under glass or plastic protection, as well as growing lettuces, micro-greens and sprouts indoors. For many of us, we are also adding a couple of inches of compost (often made at home from your own kitchen food scraps, leaves, and garden clippings) and mulch (often in the form of hay, straw, or arborist wood chips) to nourish and protect our garden soils over the winter. Wherever you are, this is a good month to be thinking of what you want to grow come this spring. Leafing through beautiful seed catalogs (Baker Creek Rare Seeds and Territorial Seed Company are two that we receive) and day-dreaming of summer harvests is a great way to get motivation for what to grow once the weather starts to warm up and the number of hours of sunlight increases. Thank you for reading our first installment of Growing For Life, and we wish you success and much growth this month.
Please feel free to send any gardening related questions or comments to Dr. Jeff Pierce directly via our patient portal. Need help getting started with the portal? Contact us at 888-420-7284. We are always happy to help!