Vegetable Garden as Therapeutic Horticulture for Patients with Chronic Pain

Throughout this horticultural endeavor, we sought to maximize the participation of our patients. Barriers to patient involvement were likely due to many factors including the distance from a patient’s home, access to reliable transportation, lack of knowledge or confidence to participate in vegetable gardening, and absence of any shaded outdoor seating. Future goals to increase overall participation include installing a covered outdoor seating area, posting more garden-related newsletters in the pain clinic, hosting more educational garden work days, increasing the size of the garden, and providing ways to allow patients to participate even from a distance (i.e., starting seedlings in their own homes).