Gardening Tips For Senior Citizens

Are your elderly parents love to work in the garden? Have they got any problems during the gardening?

In this post, you’ll know about the best gardening tips for seniors as well as why gardening is beneficial for senior citizens and why they should get out into nature.

These gardening tips for ways to make it easier and safer for seniors to continue Gardening.

Benefits of Gardening for Elderly Peoples

Here are the tips to help keep seniors safe in the garden but first of all let’s know what are the benefits of gardening not only for seniors but for all peoples.

Well gardening is great for physically and mentally as well as emotionally

It’s great to get out into nature because it's peaceful and helps to forget about the stress of whatever is going on in the world and just enjoy the plants in the backyard.

But physically it’s good because you’re doing a lot of bending and stooping and digging and weeding and all of that translates to burning calories and keeping your body fitter and your joints a little more mobile.

Another thing is strength. It helps you to maintain your strength if you’re carrying around bags of dirt or even picking them up and putting them into a little wagon or a garden trolley in order to bring them out.

You’re having to reach for things plants you know to pick them up off a shelf or gardening tools things like that.

Mentally gardening is great for seniors and everybody because it helps to reduce cortisol levels which is a stress hormone and it helps to increase serotonin levels in the brain.

Serotonin is a feel-good hormone. So it’s beneficial because it helps you to get a better state of mind and feel better about life in general in addition to reducing cortisol levels and increasing serotonin.

Gardening can help you hold off dementia simply being active decreases the chance of dementia by 50% so seniors stay active as long as possible.

So, in order to stay safe in the garden one of the things that you should do is wear a big floppy hat in the sunshine because it helps you to keep all of the Sun off of your neck.

And of course, you would want sunglasses and gardening gloves too. Another thing that is going to help is sunscreen. Always wear your sunscreen out in the Sun and also you may consider bug spray depending on where you live.

One thing especially in the heat of summer you want to make sure that you do your gardening in the morning preferably before 10 o’clock which is when it really starts to get hot out.

And if you’re going to be out in the heat you want to make sure that you try and limit yourself to being out in the actual direct sunshine to just maybe 10 minutes or so at pop and then try and get into the shade and cool down a little bit.

And You really should probably limit your gardening in the heat of summer to maybe two or three times at most in a week.

One other thing too is to make sure that you have a jug of water with you and drink from it a lot so that you stay hydrated when you’re working out in the garden.

Especially in the summer heat, you’re losing a lot of your fluids through sweating which is going to dehydrate you. So you want to be sure that you’re drinking enough water.

And one last thing you may consider wearing a mask. we’ve all gotten used to those in this era of covid19.

So everybody should have a mask but it is good to wear a mask in the garden particularly if you have an allergy.

It’s going to help you cut down on breathing in dust and things that are gonna irritate your allergies pollen. Whatever so you might consider a mask as well.

Now it times for tips for gardening for your aging parents.

#Tip no 1: Make Garden Accessible to Seniors

The first tip to help make gardening safer for seniors is to make sure that the garden is actually accessible to them. Some gardens would not work for somebody who was using a walker and obviously not for somebody who’s using a wheelchair.

So, you want to make sure that if at all possible, the person has a cement path to walk on or the this is made out of pavers as you can see if it’s not as sloping as my yard happens to be you could make a path that laid those pavers side-by-side so that it would be smoother for the senior which makes less chance of tripping.

#Tip no 2: Make sure the Garden is actually raised.

A lot of seniors are not able to stoop down. They can bend over a little bit but they can’t actually stoop down to the level of the ground in order to plants and this is where things like container gardening come into play.

Because you can put things in a race container or in a raised garden bed makes it much easier for a senior even do something like has a window box kind of a thing that you can see up there on my deck something like that.

So the person could stand up and have that on maybe the railing of a deck or a patio a stand of some type on the patio where you could put that garden up higher for them.

#Tip no 3: Consider a kneeling bench or a garden trolley

You should consider a kneeling bench or a garden trolley one of those little things that you pull behind you. You can use the garden trolley to carry some of the things out with you and then it provides a seat for the senior to sit on.

You might also consider a kneeling bench some of them have a handle like alike you would use maybe to get out of the bed or a bathtub they have those that are taller and you can use it for leverage to help get up from the knee bench tip

#Tip no 4: Consider not weeding as much as you would like

Consider not weeding as much as you would like to do that consider not meat weeding.

If your balance is poor you don’t need to be bending over and then falling over in the garden and possibly breaking a bone.

I’m not sure what the workaround is for that unless you were going to use some type of herbicide like a roundup.

#Tip no 5: Use a gardening apron

You want to use a gardening apron that’s something that’s going to go around your waist.

You can put your tools in it your hand tools your travel whatever the small little handheld ones and that is going to keep them not only in reach but it’s also going to keep you from spreading them out on the ground and then possibly turning around and tripping on them.

#Tip no 6: Wear a medical alert

If you are a senior who lives alone but when the elderly go out into the garden a lot of times they’ll work out there during the day.

When the care person is not with her/his or go outside for some work and that time seniors go for gardening having doesn’t medical alert as well seniors forget to bring their cell phone. So elderly people layout in the garden for hours until the care holder comes home.

So please I had a patient in our dental practice one time he went out I got up on a ladder or a senior he wasn’t that high up he fell off the ladder and broke his leg

They got serious problems or fell down there and no one there to look up. So always carry a cell phone or wear a medical alert so that your caretaker detects your location or know what is your current condition.

Conclusion

Gardening improves the overall performance as well health improvement of elderly peoples. So Make sure to keep watching your seniors while they are gardening and apply the above tips to make your gardening journey safe. Always hire a qualified caregiver who can take care of senior peoples.