I was supposed to be grading papers on Sunday, but I didn’t have the concentration for it. Something devastating happened to a friend last week, and my sadness had registered as a headache that had entered its third day.

Even so, Sunday was a perfect day: The sky was bright blue and the temperature was in the low 80s. At this time of year, weather like that is a gift, an autumn-defying bonus that lets the last tomato blossoms keep going a little longer. Just as startling as this spring-like day in October will be the arrival of the frost that ends the growing season and turns green to brown overnight.

The cure for a funk, I can attest, is to spend time doing one of two things: tilling or weeding. To someone who has never tended a vegetable garden, this undoubtedly sounds ridiculous, but I’m not alone in this opinion. A month or two ago, fellow columnist George Gurley sent me a clipping about the mental health advantages of gardening. It seems people study this sort of thing. I could have saved them the trouble.

Among other benefits, gardening is an antidote for depression and it lowers blood pressure. In my own experience, the exercise and focus gardening requires have everything to do with the sense of well-being I get from doing it. When I’m working in my garden, the blood flow increases to my brain and muscles, I’m soaking up Vitamin D from the sun and I’m often doing fairly repetitive tasks that channel my energy into productive activity.

While the effects of gardening aren’t as profound as the endorphin high that athletes get, there’s definitely something physical and psychological that happens when I dig around in the dirt and grow vegetables. Whatever it may be, this thing that happens when I garden is what keeps me coming back to it.

This time of year, when weeding isn’t an issue and there are no plants to tend, vegetable gardeners can be tilling things up in preparation for winter. Since I left my big garden fallow this year, I have plenty of work there and that’s where I took my negative energy on Sunday.

Personally, I find running the rototiller to be one of the finest outlets for pent-up frustration. Given the variation in equipment, no two gardeners are going to have identical tilling experiences. A gardener with a high-end Troy-Bilt would probably dispute my account, as would a gardener with a bone-rattling, front-tine tiller.

In my case, there’s just enough vibration in my old Sears tiller to make walking behind the thing interesting. It’s also loud enough to block out everything else and, after an hour or two of grinding up the dirt beneath my feet, I feel like my mind has been emptied out.

After I till, I rake the ground smooth, and this is where the real mood alteration happens. It’s during this part of the task that I can focus intently on the soil and feel it slide, velvety smooth, between my fingers or rise up between my toes.

For this reason, I have always planted barefoot. On Sunday I drew some furrows in the soil to plant garlic cloves and kicked off my dorky rubber garden clogs. I set the cloves all along the length of each furrow and then I walked down the furrow, one foot on either side, and slid dirt over the top of the cloves. It feels almost instinctive to plant this way.

When I was done, I had a bit of a sunburn on my forehead and just enough brine on my upper lip to make me feel that I had accomplished something. Life was still unfair but the day was still beautiful, too.