If you want to change your world, plant a garden.

If you’ve already planted a garden, you know this is true.

A garden gets you to go outside where you will come in contact with soil, which has amazing little bacteria in it that improve your mood, if not your health.

A garden gets you to exercise, sometimes just a little bit with a few knee squats as you do a bit of weeding, and sometimes quite a bit if you are toting bags of mulch or mowing the lawn.

A garden introduces you to beauty. A single flower. A perfect green bean. The way the sunlight filters through a green tree canopy.

A garden provides you with sustenance if you choose to grow a bit of food. And why wouldn’t you choose to grow a bit of food if given the opportunity? Is there any better vegetable than the one you grew yourself from a seed or a small seedling that you yourself planted?

A garden can erase your troubles and worries, sometimes for just a little while as you dig and weed and plant and harvest. But that little while can give you a new perspective, new insights, even better answers.

A garden can introduce you to other people who are also interested in gardening. And everyone knows a gardener introduced to another gardener has made an instant friend.

And a garden can connect you to the world, through the common experience shared by people around the world as they plant, tend, and harvest wherever they are.

If you want to change your world, plant a garden.