Eating home-grown vegetables “uplifting”

According to Tim Rumball, editor of Amateur Gardening magazine, watching something grow from a tiny seed and being able to eat it is one of the great benefits of cultivating vegetables.

“There is little more uplifting than a delicious meal that you have had some hand in creating,” he added.

Being involved in the “act of creation”, placing a seed and water in a pot in a little sunshine and watching it develop, can help lift people’s mood, he added.

“Perhaps it’s this intervention in something so fundamental to the natural world we see around us that makes gardening so exciting and rewarding,” the expert concluded.

Adults suffering from depression, anxiety or low moods can now ask their GP to refer them to a nursery for the practical and theory lessons from an expert gardener, as part of a new NHS scheme