Making the Benefits of Gardening Part of Your Senior Care Plan

Senior Care in Laguna Woods CA

Finding ways to nurture your elderly parents’ minds and bodies is a vital part of your senior care plan. Having activities that they enjoy encourages mental and emotional health, supports routine, and helps to ward off feelings of depression, isolation, and loss of motivation. Choosing activities that also works their bodies encourages even greater cognitive benefits while also supporting physical strength and long-lasting health.

One activity that many aging adults enjoy is gardening. While this may seem like just a casual pastime, it can actually offer tremendous benefits when used as part of your regular senior care routine. Whether they engage in gardening by themselves, with you, or along with the senior health care services provider, getting outside and taking care of their lawn, flowers, or a vegetable garden offers your parents a wide variety of benefits, including:

• Critical thinking. Planning a garden is a fantastic way to stretch your elderly loved ones’ critical thinking skills. Preparing a garden requires evaluating the area, determining how much light is available, deciding what types of plants to plant, and learning about how to properly care for those plants. This gets their minds working as they learn new things and push their brains to think, plan, and come up with solutions to any issues they may encounter during the planning, planting, or care process;

• Memory. Remembering to take care of their gardens, and what needs to be done each day, encourages your parents to use their memory skills. This wards off memory loss, keeps their minds strong, and helps to prevent the progression of memory loss. Encourage your parents’ senior health care services provider to offer reminders about the care tasks so that your seniors can maintain as much independence in remembering the tasks and completing them as possible;

• Sense of accomplishment. Setting and accomplishing goals supports ongoing mental and emotional health, and gardening is a wonderful opportunity to set goals and watch them progress. Particularly if your parents are working on a vegetable garden, gardening allows them to watch the results of their hard work and then enjoy the sense of accomplishment of harvesting and eating their vegetables in their favorite recipes;

• Sun exposure. Getting enough exposure to the sun is important to your parents’ health. Sun stimulates the body’s production of vitamin D, which is critical to health and metabolic functioning. Getting out in the garden provides a few minutes of sun exposure on a daily basis to ensure their bodies get this vital nutrient. Ensure they wear proper sun protection to prevent sunburns and risk of skin diseases;

• Physical activity. Your parents do not have to engage in an aerobics routine to get the exercise they need to stay healthy and strong. Gardening encourages walking, bending, stretching, and lifting, all of which offer conditioning, flexibility, and cardiovascular benefits;

• Socialization. If your aging parents have a true passion for gardening, encourage them to get involved in a garden club in your area. This offers social interaction that provides an emotional boost and supports ongoing mental health.

If you or an aging loved one is considering senior care in Laguna Woods, CA and the surrounding Orange County areas, please call us at 949-535-2211.  We provide senior care services in Newport Beach, Costa Mesa, Huntington Beach, Irvine, Laguna Woods, Laguna Beach, Mission Viejo and surrounding areas of Orange County California.  Contact us today to learn more.