Get smarter by gardening

If you are one of the people who started gardening in response to the pandemic, congratulations: you are over 5 per cent smarter than you were a year ago. That’s according to a study conducted by diys.com.

For the study, diys.com asked almost 5,000 volunteers in July 2020 which hobbies they would like to take up during the pandemic. They then asked them to take an IQ test. The participants engaged in their desired activities, and six months later were asked to take the IQ test again.

Gardening ranked 7th on the list. Learning a new instrument and reading came in 1st and 2nd, increasing IQ by 9.71 per cent and 9.68 per cent. Exercising came in 3rd, at 7.37 per cent, edging out reading at 7.07 per cent. Meditation (6.38 per cent) and learning a new language (5.88 per cent) came in 5th and 6th. Gardening raised IQs by 5.1 percentage points.

The study didn’t look at how much smarter people who’ve been gardening for years are, but we’re pretty sure the number is off the charts. We also wonder what kind of numbers they’d have got if they did the measurements from, say, April to September, when people can garden outdoors more.