Whether it’s for your health, environment — or your wallet — gardening has seen a boom in recent years. 【小题1】. Here are our top reasons to get gardening this year:

Pick your own

【小题2】. From picking your own strawberries or unearthing the first new potatoes of the year, homegrown veg is a joy. It simply tastes better. Whether that’s down to the triumph of simply growing your own or eating it when it’s at its freshest, once you start home growing you may never stop.

Invite community conversations

Over the garden fence. At the vegetable fields. While weeding your window boxes.

【小题3】. Simply being out and about in your garden invites interaction and conversation with neighbours and people in your local area, which in itself has multiple social and wellbeing benefits.

Build strength

Gardening is exercise because you do small tasks like cutting grass or raking (耙地) that fall under the category of light or moderate exercise. However, you also dig, shovel, and chop wood to get this level up to moderate exercise. 【小题4】. And this can help build up your strength.

Boost mood

Did you know that gardening can boost your mood while increasing your self-respect levels? When you make time to go out and work in your garden, your anxiety levels can go down and you could start to feel less depressed. One study looked at this benefit of gardening. There searchers took people who suffered from depression and had them participate in a 12-week long gardening. 【小题5】.

Be careful what you say around your dog. It might understand more than you think.

A border collie named Rico recognizes the names of about 200 objects, say researchers in Germany. The dog also appears to be able to learn new words as easily as a 3-year-old child. Its word-learning skills are as good as those of a parrot or chimpanzee(黑猩猩).

In one experiment, the researchers took all 200 items that Rico is supposed to know and divided them into 20 groups of 10 objects. Then the owner told the dog to go and fetch one of the items and bring it back. In four tests, Rico got 37 out of 40 commands right. As the dog couldn't see anyone to get clues, the scientists believe Rico must understand the meanings of certain words.

In another experiment, the scientists took one toy that Rico had never seen before and put it in a room with seven toys whose names the dog already knew. The owner then told Rico to fetch the object, using a word the dog had never heard before.

The correct object was chosen in seven out of l0 tests, suggesting that the dog had worked out the answer by process of elimination(排除法). A month later, Rico remembered half of the new names, which is even more impressive.

Rico is thought to be smarter than the average dog. For one thing, Rico is a border collie, a breed (品种) known for its mental abilities. In addition, the 9-year-old dog has been trained to fetch toys by their names since the age of nine months.

It's hard to know if all dogs understand at least some of the words we say. Even if they do, they can't talk back. Still, it wouldn't hurt to sweet-talk your dog every now and then. You might just get a big, wet kiss in return!

Procrastination is one of the world’s worst time sucks: You have so much that you need to do, but when it comes to actually sitting down and getting it done, it seems basically impossible. But what if I told you that the opposite of procrastination, a phenomenon called pre-crastination, could be just as bad? A new study conducted by researchers from the University of Pennsylvania recently tackled the topic of pre-crastination — and it turns out that it could be a huge problem for many of us. If you’re wondering how the opposite of procrastination could be a negative thing, it’s because it means we’re completing tasks just for sake of completing them. Pre-crastination refers to the desire to do things immediately, but only to alleviate the anxiety surrounding leaving a particular task undone.

Let me give you an example: Say that you have to respond to an email. In your hurry to get the unread email out of your inbox, you make a bunch of spelling and grammar errors in your response because you typed it out so quickly. That would be an example of pre-crastination. I know that in my own life, I like to get through the easy tasks on my to-do list first, since they can be checked off more quickly, making me feel a lot more accomplished in the process. I just thought I was prioritizing, but I now know that this is an example of pre-crastinating the easy tasks just so I could say I got them done, while simultaneously procrastinating the more tedious tasks I left at the bottom of my list.

The discovery of pre-crastination leads to many kinds of questions about behavior. Now it seems that we have to not only worry about putting things off unnecessarily, but also doing things too quickly or completing easy tasks first just so that we can get them done.

The researchers touched on this in their article, published in Scientific American, in which they advise avoiding procrastination and pre-crastination by dividing your large tasks into smaller ones. That way, you can get through seemingly difficult tasks, but also avoid sliding through all of the simple ones first. I know that I’ll definitely be more careful when it comes to how I organize my to-do lit from now on.