GREEN IS THE NEW BLACK!

Need a new interest besides work and slack on the couch with your IPad? Then I think you should strongly consider gardening and or potted plants as a new hobby.

First of all, you get fresh air and exercise, you can grow cut flowers for vases, vegetables for the dinner and you can make the surroundings pleasant for yourself and others. Gardening, plants and vegetables are also an interesting conversation topic (yes seriously!) with friends and acquaintances.

If you have kids they can mess around in the garden with you, give a helping hand while you two have a little chat.  Or maybe your better half wants to help you?

Perhaps you have an old relative you have not seen for a long time? Both young and elder generally benefits greatly from being outside in the fresh air and move around, although they obviously must accept the limitations that age necessarily provide. You can park them in a deckchair with a blanket, then you can carry on with tasks. Then none of you will feel irritated or bored. It’s a trick I’ve used myself.

Kids love (just like adults) to feel valuable and do important stuff. If they with a little guidance from you can be sowing sweet peas, a container with calendula, rake the lawn, carry some rocks, picking dandelions or do some activity together with you it’s the best that can happen to them. The real results of your joint efforts count as a subordinate matter if you both have had a good time together.

Today we organize ourselves away from the relaxing time together both young and old.

The advertisement “Stille i bilen TV” a great example and I gnash my teeth together every time I see it. The commercial is so stupid and stigmatizing for both parents and kids that it shocks me that no one reflects on this!

None of my four children has a passion for gardening or plants. But they are very fond of food, so no matter what they are reading and makes of food and drink recipes, along comes the ridiculous greenery up on their radar. Like liquorice root, pepper types, stevia, quinoa, ginger, herbs and sprout mixtures.

They all enjoy beautiful and interesting plants, rare insects, no one is afraid of wasps and they realize that organic is not necessarily the same as sustainable.

And they like to be outside. None of them is some avowed “outdoor enthusiasts”. Quite on the contrary. But they like to barbecue, have a beer in the sun, go hiking, snowboarding, wakeboarding, and generally play outside. Also as adults.

This is intended as a slightly slanted view on that no matter how little it interest you, what’s growing in the world, and how plant growth conditions are, the significance of what you are eating, your well being, your human environments and your own physical and mental health will be affected in the long term.

With minimal effort (at least in the summer), you can raise both awareness and well-being of your surroundings, serving, eat or dish out self grown vegetables to friends and family.

You don’t need the weekend trip to London or take a holiday in Malaga to enjoy yourself with your family. You can meet up in a park or on a lawn, and just do things we forgot we could do. Throw a dart, shooting at targets, picnic, cook, play with the dog or take a walk. It isn’t harder than that.

It is up to us adults to set conditions of our life with the family, not the commercial interests that make money on convincing us to the contrary.

This entry was posted on my Norwegian website 27 March.2014