Growing and Gardening Fulfills Many Human Needs

Enjoy a real Garden of Eden at your own home. Let us
imagine a world of beauty and bounty. For a few minutes
think about what a Garden of Eden means in terms of all
bliss and no work. What is the difference between this
magical world of just the bounty and what we have actually
experienced for the last millennia? What inspires us? What
cold, hard reality invades our happy thoughts of joy and
satisfaction? It is the understanding that many hours of hard
work are required to yield the many rewards obtained from
our gardens.

If we consider the human being IN nature, with the absolute
basics being health and joy, human are, in a sense, a
garden. We are vertebrates, and this is an important
fundamental term for later discussion. We have an amazing
immune system that is both a hospital and pharmacy built
within us. We have a nervous system that is designed to
work with a proper balance of electrolytes. We are blessed
with all the basic structures from our genetic makeup to be
fully functioning humans. However, all the fuel and
lubrication comes from what we choose to ingest, and how
much attention we pay to our physical activities. Humans
thrive when eating healthy food and exercising muscles.

The lesson learned from this perfect world thinking is that
being in a garden environment is a natural state – a state of
health. We understand that this makes sense, and yet there
has always been a caveat, a universe of reasons, problems,
and finally excuses, why we don’t engage in one of nature’s
optimal activities; the best activity to promote health as well
as feelings of well-being and joy is gardening, yet many
stand back envisioning sore backs and knees.

Let us analyze what work means in a garden. Exercise is a
form of work, and typically we consider exercise to be
something positive. The Greek root for the word work is
“ergo”. which we often hear inappropriately used to describe
many items and tools as “ergonomic”. In a few moments I
will address the true meaning of “ergonomic design” as it
applies to garden tools. For now, let us list all the tasks that
require the type of heavy, physical work which often deters
us from engaging in what can be a healthy activity:
Lifting rocks
Lifting weeds
Lifting invasive roots
Lifting root crops
Lifting shrubs
Lifting over-wintered plant stumps
Lifting plants, transplanting
Lifting grasses to start a garden
Notice there is a theme here? 90% of this work is the hard
stuff, the cringe worthy body movements that actually
create many legitimate concerns about safety, accidents
leading to infirmity, and injury.

90% of these tasks entail LIFTING. What if there was a tool,
constructed in the proper sense of “true ergonomics”, that is
a force multiplier by design. The technical function of a true
tool is a device that delivers mechanical advantage (not just
an extension of one’s body). For a thousand years or more
humans have used shovels and forks as an extension of
THEIR BODIES, hurting themselves in the process. The Earth
Lifter Tool (ELT) is a true ergonomic tool in the sense that
the tool has a built-in mechanical advantage envisioned by
Archimedes over 20 centuries ago. The Earth Lifter Tool
LIFTS with gravity, not against it. The ELT takes ¼ the
effort, the power, and the strength to complete the tasks
listed above, which we consider difficult, hard, heavy, and
onerous. The tool does the most difficult work for you.

There is a second major concern and consideration. I used
the term VERTEBRATES, meaning we have a spinal column
that operates in a certain orientation, forward and back.
Visualize the positioning of your spine when you are
shoveling snow, or dirt. You bend, then twist, then bend a
bit more for lifting leverage, then you jerk the weight and
sometimes get hung up on roots as you work against
gravity. The spine has buffers between the bony structures
called discs. Discs were not designed to have such as
awkward orientation, especially with forces squeezing them
under a heavy load repetitively. The Earth Lifter Tool not
only multiplies your strength while working with gravity, but
more importantly, it was designed to allow you to work with
a healthy and proper orientation of your spine.

Once you rupture a disc it doesn’t repair itself, it is
permanent. Why hurt yourself if you don’t have to? Far too
many of us lead a sedentary lifestyle, and too many have
jobs where we sit for extended hours in positions that our
spines did not evolve to sustain.

The Earth Lifter Tool was originally conceived so that a one-handed person with spinal issues could be enabled to lift
potatoes instead of using a traditional two-handed tool.
While improving and developing the engineering, the physics
innovation of Archimedes was improved by considering the
geometry of Pythagorus, by making a rolling fulcrum. This
innovation is very subtle but it adds an arc surface to
stabilize and spread forces, converting a wedging tendency
into a lifting motion . At the same time it creates a shoveling
activity and the force that makes a lifting action possible.
This vertical alignment is much gentler on delicate roots,
root crops, and tuber plants.

Underlying the physics, geometry, proper body orientation
and strength multiplying aspects is a single NEW CLASS of
tool that does the heavy work. The Earth Lifter is an
enabling tool. It allows many who have spine and joint
problems not to hurt themselves. It helps those with
disabilities or other physical challenges to enjoy growing
what they love again. The human body is basically a vessel
for our Gut Biome. As much as we need exercise, we need
whole foods with a variety of nutrients and roughage to feed
the bacteria which produces most of the complex chemicals
that make us healthy. Exercise moves our organs and flexes
our bones, regulating insulin, feeding our T-cells and
multiplying our stem cells, resulting in the maxim: “Let Food
Be Thy Medicine”. Being in the garden and outdoors in the
sun allow our largest organ, our skin, to transform solar rays
into Vitamin D3, a vital component for the immune system.

Taking a deeper dive, the ELT, while promoting and assisting
gardening, also provides an enormous mental health benefit.
It restores those moments of reverie, joy, feelings of
accomplishment, confidence through competence, and a
spiritual alignment with our primordial instinct that tells us
we are a part of nature.

The world is filled with too many distractions and
interruptions preventing us from focusing on our inner
thoughts. We have a split brain that, more and more, is
being conditioned to an abstract, regimented, and ordered
structure; follow the rules and get a chemical pleasure
reward. However, similar to properly balanced physical
exercise, we need the happiness chemical reward too, which
comes from a complex activity that fulfills a task. Stated
simply, growing and gardening fulfills many important
human needs