GARDENING FOR HEALTH: HELPS SENIORS GROW PHYSCIALLY, MENTALLY

At right, Creglow hammered a fence post next to his tomato cage to give it strength when the tomato plant grows.

Above, Creglow walked beside his rear-tine tiller while doing some light surface tilling.

Creglow grows a variety of vegetables and gives most of them away to his neighbors at Chateau Girardeau.

It's hard to tell what G.H. Creglow would rather do, grow produce or eat it. The 84-year-old retiree owns a plot of land behind the Bavarian Halle near the Fruitland exit of Interstate 55. He drives there nearly every day from the Chateau Girardeau retirement community to plant or hoe or till or mow or weed or harvest.

"Last year, I had the darnedest crop of cucumbers," he said. "I took about a bushel of cucumbers in every day, slicers, and I gave it away."

He grows 12 varieties of tomatoes, four kinds of blackberries, five kinds of gooseberries, two varieties of strawberries, cabbage, lettuce, broccoli, cucumbers, squash, you name it, on his 1 1/2 acres.

In spite of eight decades of life, and two decades of gardening, he seems to do all aspects of gardening with little difficulty.

His agility and health may be a result of his gardening. Not just because he eats fresh vegetables throughout the growing season, but, research shows, because the physical act of gardening is actually good exercise.

Diane Relf of the Department of Horticulture at Virginia Polytechnic University studied how much energy human beings use up planting seeds in various gardening activities. She found that raking a lawn or planting seeds takes as much energy as bicycling at less than 10 miles per hour and that shoveling soil burns up as much energy as swimming or doing aerobics.

The benefits go beyond physical exercise for those who are already healthy, said Denny Schrock, an extension horticulturist with the University of Missouri-Columbia.

Physical therapists are using gardening to extend the range of motion of people recovering from automobile accidents, Schrock.

In addition, there is a movement in some nursing homes called the Eden Alternative, Schrock said. Its advocates involve residents and staff in gardening and taking care of animals.

First implemented in a nursing home in New Berlin, N.Y., William H. Thomas, the medical director, decided to involve the residents in gardening and caring for animals. He found the use of psychotropic drugs dropped by 50 percent, employee turnover dropped by 23 percent and the death rate dropped as well, said Linda Wechworth of the Summer Hill Co., a company that trains nursing home personnel to implement the Eden Alternative.

This approach to nursing homes has spread and has gained the endorsement of the Missouri Division of Aging, Schrock said.

John Morley, a gerontologist at St. Louis University Medical School, has studied the Eden Alternative and is an enthusiastic supporter, although preliminary results from his study of an Eden Alternative nursing home haven't yielded such a spectacular outcome. "Our preliminary results have shown a decrease in depression," Morley said.

He said the exercise in gardening is good for nursing home residents' physical health, even for people with disabilities. Some nursing homes have adapted gardens so people in wheelchairs can work in them by putting the plants in elevated beds. An example of such a garden is in the St. Louis Botanical Garden, Morley said.

Morley warns that gardening is not for everyone -- some people just don't like it.

Those starting a garden shouldn't expect miraculous health improvements overnight and should remember to take some commonsense precautions to be sure the activity is healthful, Schrock said.

They need to be sure they are protected from excessive sunlight. Schrock recommends wearing sun blockers and a hat that provides some shade and not working in a garden at midday in the summer, stick to mornings and evenings.

It's also important to make sure your tools are comfortable. Long handled hoes are easier on one's back, Schrock said, because a gardener can hoe without bending.

Other tools are ergonomically designed as well. It's possible to get carpal-tunnel syndrome from the wrong pruning shears used too often, Schrock said. Fiskars manufactures pruning shears designed so that gardeners with arthritis can use them.

Why does Creglow garden?

"To me, it is an escape," he said.

Watching Creglow tend to his tomatoes, it is easy to tell what an engaging activity it is. He constantly experiments with different methods, often using two or more side-by-side to see which works better.

A casual observer of his garden can see that Creglow surrounded some of his tomatoes with a circle of wire fencing and some with a "wall of water," flexible clear plastic filled with water. The water absorbs heat from sunlight during the day and retains it overnight, keeping the tomatoes warm in the cold. Earlier in the year, he had the wall of water surrounding all his tomatoes.

It all adds up to what Creglow calls, "the pleasure of growing stuff."