Gardening makes you feel younger and there’s proof in your laundry room.

If you are gardening nearly every day, like I try to do during the growing season, you’ll end up with a pile of laundry, just like a toddler’s!

Won’t that make you feel younger?

Like a toddler, you’ll get at least two outfits dirty daily.

You’ll get the clothes you wore out to the garden first thing in the morning dirty, and then you’ll get the clothes you wore after you got all cleaned up dirty.

How?

Because even though you thought you were done gardening and “clean for the day” and wearing what you considered to be your “good” clothes, you’ll probably go outside later in the day for a few minutes to check on one thing and then before you can say “spin cycle,” you’ll be down on your knees pulling a weed or sweating through another shirt while you are watering those hanging baskets you forgot to water when you were out there in your actual gardening clothes.

Plus, just like a toddler, you’ll end up with various stains on your clothes that may or may not come out when you wash those clothes. Like grass stains, tomato juice stains from eating tomatoes while standing in the garden, or purple stains from who knows what those berries were.

You may also end up with holes in the knees of your jeans and weird little tears in your t-shirts, just like a toddler.

Eventually, you may even be out in your garden—your private sanctuary—gardening in an outfit that looks just like what a toddler would pick out to wear, an outfit you would definitely change out of before going to even the garden center.

And all of the above will make you feel younger, or it should!

But then you’ll be standing in your laundry room, away from your younger-feeling world of gardening and right in the middle of your adult world of piles of dirty gardening clothes. You’ll be wondering how to wash all those gardening clothes and get the stains out so you could wear them to the garden center without looking like a toddler who dressed herself. For that little problem, I recommend you read Laundry Love: Finding Joy in a Common Chore by Patric Richardson with Karin B. Miller. Honest to peat, Patric, aka the Laundry Evangelist, will make you happy to have dirty gardening clothes to try out all the laundry tips he packed into his memoir/laundry advice book.