World Naked Gardening Day 2024

World Naked Gardening Day 2024 is coming up on Saturday May 4^th this year. Gardening is something that innately goes hand in hand with naturism. What is more essential than the experience of tactile working breathing, smelling, tasting, fully interacting with a garden? How more open to that experience than to know it absolutely nude? If you have done this, you just know what I mean. This post, I’m going to dig a little deeper into this gardening experience and show you what I came up with.

Gardening is age old with a wealth of rewards of health and wellbeing. There is a symbiotic relationship between gardening and gut health. It’s also about microbiome.

One of the major reasons that I have missed a couple of weekly posts the last few months, have been my studies and adaptation of health and longevity. I understand the spirituality of my life and naturism. There are also many documented relationships between nudity and health that I have been delving into for my lifetime and occasionally mentioned here. I’ve been looking more in-depth at eating and exercise.

Food has been a concentration of study toward my goals. Food comes from a garden, be it natural, a farm, at home, or community activity. I bought a house with one large tree and two nearly dead youths. The rest was an abused dirt lot.  Absolutely nothing grew there.

My mandate for our sweat’s non-profit status is to encourage and experiment with sustainability.  One of my jobs is to produce a meditative garden. I began to think of a small veggie garden and growing water efficient desert flora. I thought about color and natural balance placements, as I lived in and studied a biodiverse live living desert for twenty years. But I desired a more edible, or useful natural gift of the gods. All of these aforementioned led to an intersection of more veggies and edible green things.

I was having trouble getting even desert plants to survive, so I had to begin a program to gradually improve the soil. I brought in several yards of organic material and spent days working it in.

The best use of precious water brought me to a rainwater harvesting scheme to collect into a natural looking functioning creek/pond and swales.  Now, all of the rainwater stays on the property nourishing the soil. I use more of the city water, but only a few bucks each month. I’m careful and frugal. I use drip lines.

I continue to improve the soil quality and mulch. New trees are coming up and placed to make use of summer shade and warm winter sun. Some bear fruit.

With the six and a quarter foot wall all around, my privacy has given us good tans and Vitamin D all year long. I have practiced barefoot living with evolving success, correcting my posture and gait. I’m using my muscles by bending and squatting, lifting and other necessary natural movements.

I’ve been feeling better and better and the improvement has felt as if I am getting younger and younger. By my research, I find that biologically, I actually am reversing age on several levels, or maybe more correctly, getting back in shape.

Soil, plants and my biology all have a common link, microbiome. These tiny critters are found in the soil. The richer, the healthier, the more nutrients the more supportive, the soil is. I’m doing whatever I can to nurture a more diverse, balanced, ecological world in the soil. Great soil and mulch holds water in a desert. It is edible. I can roll in it, smear it, love it, and appreciate it. I feel a sense of wealth from it, as it accumulates on my knees and under my nails. I connect to the Earth’s electromagnetic field on moist earth. Naked, I am a part of. Naked, I embody what is natural, but there is more.

With diversity in mind, last Fall, I got a bag of 25 different winter vegetable varieties and some starts to try in this rich soil. The more diversity, the more health. I hadn’t had an edible garden for years. This is a plan to learn with hands-on process.

The soil nurtures the plants. The plants reflect the micobiome’s quality of the soil. The plants are then healthier. I can taste the difference. They are more nutritious than what I find in even the organic stores. I taste it. I can say that I notably feel the difference. It is fresh out of the ground, still a live living entity. Stores sell plants that sit for sometimes a couple of weeks before getting on the table. I’ll add that cooking them decreases the nutrient density at least another 30%, depending.

I can taste the quality of nutrients from soil to soil in stores, when I compare to the local farmers market. These days, a farmer even “organic” farmers, may not continue to improve soil other than to slap some NPK fertilizer on it each year. That doesn’t help a microbiome have the complexity that it needs, to transfer what it has to the plants health needs.

So, here we are, a healthy soil biome, transferred into and now sharing the same microbiome with plants. The next level is me, us. We have a microbiome within us, trillions of microbes, little critters that make up more of us that our actual humanity. We are of this Earth and the closer we are naturally to a healthy world, the closer is our reflection of it in our systems of health. We are sharing that same healthy microbiome with the plants that we consume and the soil.

There is more to it. Our microbiome is critical.

The gut microbiome, comprised of bacteria, fungi, viruses, and other microorganisms, plays a crucial role in digestion, immune function, metabolism, and even mood regulation. A balanced and diverse microbiome is associated with better overall health, while imbalances have been linked to a range of health issues, from digestive disorders to autoimmune diseases. The gut and the brain are so interlinked that we, at this point, can’t be certain which is directs us more. Issues of Alzheimer’s and autism/ASD are more about gut health and consequent gene expression.

Here are a few ways that gut health is affected by gardening:

By working with soil, planting seeds, and tending to plants, we come into contact with a diversity of beneficial microbes that can help to enrich and diversify our gut microbiome. We soak in these through our skin, we breathe them. Picking peas off of the plant and munching gives us more than peas. The harvest can’t always be clean and shouldn’t be cleaned by chemicals. The beneficial critters are there. It’s good to imbibe all over our bodies to support gut health.

Gardening has been shown to reduce stress levels and promote relaxation. This has a positive impact on gut health. Chronic stress has been linked to dysbiosis and inflammation in the gut. Nude in nature has been shown to be highly relaxing.

The physical exertion involved in tasks like digging, planting, and weeding can stimulate the rhythmic contractions of the intestines that move food through the digestive tract and so regular bowel movements. Clothing restricts movement, be it a belt’s squeeze, or the pull of tight fabric. Muscles love movement. Use it or lose it.

Most of us have a disrupted battle weary neglected gut to some degree. Anti-biotics taken medically and also from eating sick animals ravage our beneficial biome. We have imbalances of good and bad components in our gut from eating poor diets. Sugars are an example of something we eat that feeds the bad boys. Lack of prebiotics, much less nutrient density in our food and stress are just a few. We need restoration. This messed up gut is what makes us not just sick, but chronically sick. A healthy microbiome is diverse and balanced. To be healthy, it just follows that that should be the nature of the foods that go into it. Eat a diversity of fresh rich vegetables and that is what grows in a garden.

My days have generally been starting by drinking a glass of clean water and then walking out my door completely naked. The sun greets me. I feel the life force, the energy, I stretch and warm like a lizard.  After a while, to break my daily fast, I take my red colander out to the garden. I begin to squat and bend, pulling weeds and talking to each plant, as I gather what I need, which is a leaf or two off of each variety. It feels good. I end up with eight to twelve types of plant, which fills my blender.

I add some fruit, like antioxidant blueberries. Again, fresh and diversified is what builds the biome. I add some powders. One carefully sourced raw egg adds good cholesterol, which with all of that sunshine on my nude body has solved my vitamin D deficiency. That one huge salad and its connection to what I eat, probably gives me more nutrition than many people get in a week. I feel a difference.

I connect with the natural in the elemental ancestral ways. I propagate, gather, understand and work with the plants. It is symbiotic, nurturing, I take the time to clean, prepare and appreciate. It is natural. It is naturism.  Every moment spent in the garden is an investment in my health and happiness.

I’ve switched my focus to edible gardening. There are few rows, but patches of various plants of all sizes and shapes. I have learned much about creating a rich diversity. More than half of the food that I ate this winter came from my yard and the small less than 150 square foot spot.

We have learned about weeds as well. Edible, some are more nutritious than the domestic seed’s offspring and certainly easy to grow.

We are now shifting into summer varieties. The high temperatures of Tucson summer will be a challenge. I’ve expanded the garden, double or more. There will be more flowers, many to eat. Fast growing super nutritious moringa and hemp will give walls of shade. We have an additional heirloom native section to plant, when the monsoon begins to arrive. Given time, evolution and experience will create.

We needed to construct a shade screen structure.  Over years, the young trees will grow as shady shelters and the yard will be cooler and the soil will better hold its water.

Curiously, all of my relatives that lived well into their nineties had a small garden out back and I remember a special quality when I ate their cooking.

It is a treat to wonder completely naked through a garden, cool grass under bare foot, finding joy in the next discovery, like when those seeds have popped out of the ground one morning, or the next ripe mulberry drops gently into the palm of my hand.

There is a sense of time, as a yellow iris’ scent somehow brings peace and I know in a complete way, that Spring is here.

Sometimes, it feels a little like living in Eden.

I am on the forum of FreeRangeNaturism.com often, if you would like to converse.

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