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Take Your Time
6. Choose gardening tools with padded handles to protect the joints in your hands and fingers from excess pressure. Tools like shears or clippers with a spring-action, self-opening feature are particularly helpful if you have a weak grasp, notes the American Occupational Therapy Association.7. Divide large bags of mulch, dirt, or fertilizer into smaller, more manageable loads and use a cart or wagon to move materials. When lifting, use the muscles in your legs, not your back.
8. Vary your tasks so that you avoid overstressing any one part of your body. For instance, don't spend the entire day stooping and weeding. Instead, pick one section of the garden to weed, then lay mulch and rake. Tackle another section the following day.
9. Take time after gardening to sit in a shady spot and rest your eyes on your accomplishments. Sip a cool drink and just enjoy the beauty around you.
10. Plant at least one vegetable in your garden. You'll be more likely to eat it. Also plant some herbs to use in place of salt for flavoring food.
11. Always order/buy twice as much mulch as you think you'll need. The more mulch you put down in the garden, the more weed control you'll have (and the less tempted you'll be to use poisonous weed killers).
12. Keep all your gardening tools, gloves, and so on, in a backpack that you can carry with you as you move from bed to bed.
13. Keep your garden manageable. That might even mean container gardening. If you take on too much too soon, not only will you find yourself sore the next morning (and risk a more serious injury) but you'll quickly become overwhelmed and quit altogether.
14. Carry a water bottle slung around your body and be sure to sip on it every 30 minutes or so. It's easy to become dehydrated when you're working in the yard.
15. Emphasize flowers, not bushes, in your landscape. The pollen in flowers rarely causes allergies, due to its large size. It's the microscopic pollens from many bushes and trees that are culprits for people with allergies.
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