What is going on everyone Kevin from Epic Gardening here? We're back with Erica Nolan of Instar Farms.

Today we're kind of talking about Garden Therapy, which I think actually is a real thing that people actually are prescribed by doctors somewhere out there

That's not the way that we're probably going to be talking about it today

We're just talking about you you know, what practical things does gardening do for your health,

which I feel like we all kind of know is pretty obvious if you eat what you grow, but what about

your mental health as well? I know for me when I first started I might have been

Let's see 23 or 24 I want to say to maybe 22 and I had just come out of college and was just trying to figure out what I wanted to do in my life and I did not know which is extremely common at that age and I have always been a technological kind of like a gamer skateboarder kind of kid and at that time in life

You know wasn't wasn't a lot going on for me, so I was turning to video games. I was just playing video games for hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and

hours and then my mom actually asked me to help my brother

stop playing video games but she didn't know I was playing video games

like crazy too because I wasn't living at home but he was and so I gave him a bunch of things that we could do together and I was like oh yeah mom totally I'll totally help my brother do it you know despite her not knowing that probably was going to help me more.

And so he picked gardening, we got off on the right foot, we hit the nursery, we started growing

things and then things just sort of blossom from there.

So I know for me, it gave me a way to reconnect with nature and reconnect with the natural world

instead of just burning my hours away on, you know, World ofcraft or whatever game I was playing at the time but I'm I'm hoping

Erica that your story does not involve video game addiction

But I'm sure you've got some really cool benefits that you've

noticed either for yourself or your clients. Yeah definitely you know I think that it

really came to my attention when I found out that my mom had brain had a brain tumor that she

needed to get brain surgery for and then six months later we found that she

had breast cancer and it was like this all of a sudden like flash over me

realizing how we really got to take care of our bodies and our minds and how do we do that you know I think some really

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