Restarting My Garden

I can finally show off a little bit of my gardening this year. For the first time since I began having a garden in 2016, I had to start planting from scratch. Even when I rebuilt the wagon a year or two back, I had plants saved to put back. But not this year—the single digits freeze in December killed all the plants I took inside; my craft room, where I hid them from my kitties, still ended up going below freezing and so no plants made it.

Since I’ve had consistently inconsistent luck with seeds over the years and didn’t start any early, since I was still hoping my plants would wake back up, I decided to just buy some small plants to get restarted. Rosemary and basil again, because I love cooking baking with them, and I’ve been wanting to try some lavender and thyme. I also have an indoor aloe plant because I grew up with those and my last two only died because my cats kept trying to eat them. (I finally have a place inside where I think it’ll get enough light but they can’t get to it *fingers crossed* this time.) And finally, a strawberry plant! I planned to get one last year, but then was late enough that the shop was already sold out of them, so this year I wasn’t going to miss my chance again.

I’ve some catnip seeds planted as well, but they’re still just starting. I don’t know if they’ll be big enough to harvest from this year. In 2016, it took a couple years from them to get established.

I planted them back around the spring equinox, but there was a frost after and my attempts to cocoon the garden worked great for the hardier plants, but not the basil. So I’ve been putting off writing about it until the lows were above freezing and I was able to either replace or plant something else in the empty places. But there was still plenty of basil of the store, so I’m just watching the weather very carefully the next few weeks to make sure I don’t have to go rescue them into a pot and bring inside.

So far, everything’s doing great this year. The weather’s been mostly cooperating and since the garden wagon is something that I do, in part, to honor my spirits, I’ve committed to spending a bit more time and energy on it again. Last year, even before the frost killed everything, nothing was doing well. It was a poor year and while a lot of it was rain and temperature related, I feel bad about how little I did to mitigate it.

This year I’m determined to do better. And I was rewarded for my efforts so far today with the first ever ripe strawberry from my own plant to eat! It was delicious, maybe the best strawberry I’ve ever eaten. ❤

Spring Beginnings

Hope everyone had a nice Imbolc, etc. I’ve been busy lately, but mine went well. It seemed to confirm energies I was picking up these last couple of months that whatever the weirdness has been going on the last year+ in my Between rituals has ended and shifted back to normal—finally, yay!

Preps started a bit early this year because my garden needed a lot of work. It’s dedicated to my spirits and I started it as a learning/devotional aspect of my practice with them, so it has a place in my rituals and a lot of the cycles I follow are from rhythms of growing they keep in their own growing out in the Otherworlds. And the Free Court is nomadic, so there’s bending room for my climate; even though it’s a similar cycle of rituals we follow to the Wheel of the Year and vague traditions of old European agriculture, it seems to work out anywhere in the northern hemisphere north of the tropics (which I don’t know enough about to say anything). I live in the southeastern US but I’ve seen documentaries of people gardening in England, Alaska, and Arizona where details are all different, but I still see shades of my ritual rhythms in what they’re doing. It’s a comfort for me, as someone who will likely live other places and within a couple more years hopefully have finished restoration and travel projects to be mostly nomadic myself, to feel like the magick is still going to work and be relevant and that the success or failure is not in changing everything but in the space between the rituals and reading the weather and seasons in the area to find a balance somewhere in there.

This year was a big rebuild of the garden wagon. I started it in 2016 with an expanded metal garden cart I bought and cedar planks…but the cedar was waterlogged and the burlap and woodchips I used beneath the soil had rotted away over the years where I’d lost about two-thirds of my soil depth by last year’s planting. I cleaned it completely out and was lucky the wood, once dried out, was not as damaged as I thought and could be reused. And instead of burlap and stuff, this time I lined it with aluminum screen. It should still let the water out so it doesn’t flood, but let very little soil out and hopefully also protect the couple places where the expanded metal was showing some damage. Then I made a custom garden blend of soil by buying several types that matched up to what I wanted to plant.

It was really important to get it done before the beginning of February, because in White Spring (our version…ish of Imbolc), after the big candle ritual there’s one for each of us lit from the fire and a tradition of then doing your own magick and projects while it’s lit to add your energy to it as well. Afterward, when it’s just I tiny stub of wax, each of us buries that under the soil of our garden wagon to dedicate and bless it for the coming year with energy and safety and bounty. So, it had to be done before that so I’d have a place.

As usual, I had my main Otherworlds ritual—also known as Don’t Set My Head On Fire Day with my ritual crown of candles. This is the first year I’ve felt like I really had figured out perfectly my technique for cutting and trying the evergreen on perfectly, finally. It was the same as always and I never say much more about it than that, but there was a sense of growing and relief and that everything was going to be okay happening in it this year after pushing through for the last couple, which was nice and uplifting.

My project this-side while my candle was burning was planting some seeds. I’ve not had great success from seeds before, but I’m trying again and this time starting indoors earlier until they germinate. *fingers crossed* And this year I decided to branch out. I have limited space and so have previously stuck just with herbs, but I really wanted to try some veggies…so several kinds of peppers (I love spicy) and some small cucumbers, short okra, tiny salad tomatoes, and some bunching onions. I made some tiny mini-greenhouse-ish boxes for them and repurposed a tiny spray bottle for watering. I’m also considering trying to add some potatoes and maybe buying a strawberry plant but still researching to decide on those additions in the next couple of weeks.

Lastly, I think I mentioned a plan but never doing it last year, but I transplanted my surviving plants out of the garden wagon before it got cold in the late fall. I have two big pots of catnip and one of rosemary, a small one of flat parsley, and another small one of either lemon balm or sweet mint (but I kept mixing their leaves up last year and telling by smell and I don’t want to take one of its few winter leaves to sniff and tell…either is good and I’ll know in a few weeks when it starts spring growth anyway. They’ve been living in my half-restored camper (ignore my disassembled taillights in the background, lol) because it’s up from the ground and insulated and then I bring them back out on sunny days so they don’t wilt away as possible, but that’s worked better than I really expected it to over this winter.

Anyway: welcome to the impending imminent coming of spring! Yay!

Fourth Garden Update

It’s been a while since an update and all my little plants have been growing. The weather has continued to not cooperate quite as well as it did last year, rain- and temperature-wise, but still well enough. I just have to remember to go out and water on the many days rain was predicted and but then never turned up, and several plants don’t love the weird cool/cold couple days here and there that keep interrupting the usual summer weather this year.

I lost my dill and one of my three basil plants from cold snaps back in the spring and the other two basil plants and my chamomile are having a hard time recovering. Looks like it’ll be a small and late harvest, but still a chance of one.

The catnip and sweet mint and parsley and rosemary, though, are all thriving. It’s been one of my focuses this week has been starting to pick and preserve some from them before they end up so tall and dense they steal all the sunlight from my recovering stuff. Besides, I notices last year that a lot of leaves died off over the early summer without any benefit to the plant from leaving them and replenished over the autumn when I was regularly collecting small batches of leaves and things to use…so seemed was no reason to wait so long.

I’ve been saving like I did last year with catnip and basil, washing and cutting the leaves and then freezing them in olive oil. Then they’re in perfect portion sizes to thaw and use searing meat or fish or veggies or adding to noodles or sauces or whatever. And they keep nearly the whole year that way.

This week’s batch was some catnip, sweet mint, lemon balm, flat parsley, and rosemary. I think I’m most excited about the last two, since I cook with them so much but have never tried them in this method before. Yay! 🪴

Third Garden Update

Another update on my garden! It’s been a nice and relaxing touchstone lately. Last year I was encouraged to start a tentative practice after my May Day rituals to gather up extra, leftover energy in a candle and have a little ritual for my garden, just a bit of a push of good vibes. So I’ve been trying to keep a closer eye during this period this year so I’ll know what intentions are needed then.

I decided a couple of weeks ago I could indeed fit a few more plants and so added some dill and some sweet mint.

Unfortunately, afterward there was an unexpected late cold snap for a couple days where the temperatures at night dropped all the way down to around freezing (pretty rare around here at this time of year) and so several of my plants got a bit frostbitten, including those new ones and most especially my basil since it really doesn’t like cold. I wasn’t sure at first if they were going to be okay.

But I’ve been paying special attention since trying to keep them well-watered and sending good vibes. (And hehe, yes, I talk to my plants and so there have been some encouraging words.) It’s going well, though! Quite a difference in the before and after and it’s only been about a week so far—yay! 🙂

Before:

After:

Second Garden Update

It’s warm, the birds are singing, and the little buds and green starting to make their appearance now. I spent time over the weekend moving plants around and procuring some new ones to try for my garden since it’s supposed to be rain and warm weather on the way.

Usually I’ve grown from seeds, and I’d planned to try pre-growing inside this year to improve on that and be able to have them earlier since they did so well with small, frequent harvests over months last year—but then family health chaos happened January and February and so I never managed to get them started. So this year I decided to spring the few extra dollars to buy tiny plants. There was a nice display at the home improvement store last year (maybe there is every year and I just didn’t know where to look for it hidden away behind the flowers and decorative stuff). Not as varied in options as seeds—but given that they don’t always grow and sometimes haven’t gotten roots down well enough for the heat, it’s not really less.

I definitely wanted sweet basil again, like last year. I still have quite a bit stored frozen in olive oil, but now that I know I’ll have it again this year I can be a bit freer in using that. It’s the only one I bought two plants, just in case.

And a nice rosemary even though it was a bit more expensive than the others. I’ve tried to grow rosemary two or three times before, but it didn’t work. This one’s already thriving and had *so much root growth* when I removed it from its little pot—like twice what I expected, so maybe it’ll do better. I’ve been cooking several years with dried rosemary and I love the flavor, but I’m just not keen on that texture. Every year I’ve been excited for fresh and never had any, so I’m crossing my fingers this will finally be the year.

Chamomile. I’ve planted it once or twice but, same as the rosemary, never had a harvest. Last year there was actually one tiny sprout that came up and I wasn’t sure which of those two it was because it was so small…I tried to nurse it bigger for months to at least know which, but then it died in the magick cull. I knew mature rosemary but had only seen chamomile flowers before; looking at this plant that’s probably what it was. If it does well, it’ll be a kind I can use and dry and enjoy in the kitchen.

Lastly, some flat parsley. I have some ground and dried, but I’ve come across a lot of recipes calling for fresh and just had to substitute. Nothing better than fresh I grew myself to try that, right?

I’m not sure if I’m done, yet. I was cautious about costs and I didn’t want to buy too much and then have them crowd each other and not so well. There were a few other nice options, but I didn’t know them as well. I think I’m going to see how these do for a week or two and then I’ll maybe add another plant or two if it still looks so roomy in the garden.

First Garden Update Of The Year!

It’s been lovely weather today and so I’ve been out with the plants. I’m so ready for these last, stubborn hints of winter to finally go and everything to really start growing and blooming again. It’s felt like a very long winter this year—even though I think it’s probably only seemed that way since it was never all that cold. But the gray and rain and all has gotten to me more than some years.

Back in February I took the candle bit from my first spring season ritual and buried under my garden wagon to invite good growth and blessed plants for the next year, and that’s always my first step in waking it back up for a new springtime. But I didn’t finish clearing out dead leaves and old stalks until today.

I have a bunch of beautiful catnip that never fully died back from last year since it was a rather warm and wet winter; I clipped off the tall dry stalks, but the rest is in thick bunches already flourishing! Best-looking catnip plants I’ve ever had. There’s a few other things as well, but still so tiny it’s hard to be sure if they’re returning from last year’s seeds or gifts of the birdies in the tree overhead. Soon, I’ll know. And then I can really start adding new plants and moving them out, once I’m sure what’s worth keeping and that there won’t be one last frost here.

While I was enjoying the sunshine and already in plant mode, I also did a little foraging. All the infused oils I made myself last year are almost gone now and I’ve loved using them. Last year, my favorite was the cedar ones, but at this time of the season the cedar is in full pollen mode right now. Instead, I decided to try using the other evergreen on the property—which is Leyland cypress. It’s my first time trying that, but I found someone online who was steaming oils from it so it is fragrant enough for that sort of thing, even if an unusual option.

I did my usual foraging ritual of asking the tree and waiting until I feel a yes before proceeding, then asking if there’s any limits or anything it wants in return. Sometimes not really, like today, but in the past, I’ve been told only from the shade side or only near the bottom or I have to get rid of a vine inside that’s creeping up or it’d like an offering of fresh water…always very tree-ish concerns I’m happy to help with and that seem like just good husbandry of the plant, but that I maybe wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. It feels like a very fair exchange, plants offering a little bit of themselves and receiving in return small things that help them thrive better—win-win.

I’ve cut it up and put it in olive oil like I’ve used previously and now it’ll be warming and infusing over the weekend—yay for all those forest-y scents to look forward to–but it’s already smelling nice so I’m pretty hopeful this oil will be a success like the others. *fingers crossed*

Harvests (Last Garden Update)

One of the things I’ve been working on the last month or two has been harvesting and squaring away my gardening and foraging before cold weather came along. This was my first year having any real harvest from my garden and also my first year of foraging, so it’s been exciting.

I mentioned back at the beginning of August that about 2/3 of my garden died overnight as a sign/caught in a negative energy things and that’s true, it did. But some of the plants survived and I was able to nurse back to health: mostly the catnip, which is pretty hardy, and a little bit of basil. It’s been a limited harvest as far as variety, but a lot of those because they completely took over the whole space during August and September where everything else had died off. As disappointing as it was to lose the other things, I still ended the year feeling really proud of my efforts because of the wonderful recovery and late flourishing.

Certainly, it’s also been a whole other adventure as I began learning how to wash and dry and store—especially since I had so much of just a couple of plants and so could try more than one technique. I also found there was a weird mental block to get past because I’ve never before grown or foraged anything from the ground all the way to eating it myself and so there was an odd paranoia of wondering if it was really clean or right or safe. Everything earlier this year has been for oils and incense and things to be used topically, and it did take that mental moment to work through putting it in my mouth.

This is probably my favorite preservation technique I’ve learned so far. I found it while looking for how best to preserve basil for cooking, especially without fancy equipment: you wash and let it dry, then cut it up fresh and put the diced bits into an ice tray and then cover them with olive oil and freeze them. Once they’re hard, you snap them out and store them sealed in the freezer until you’re ready to use them and then they melt back into just oil and leaves at room temperature. I tried it with catnip, too, and while the flavor is slightly less strong it still worked really well.

I learned to fry and pan-sear in oil earlier this year during lockdown and so this was great. One cube is about perfect to cook a fish filet or add to noodles for flavor without making them oily or give a little sizzle to bread dumplings or potato wafers on the stove-top. I’m usually cooking for just me and the cubes are perfect as a portion size.

I liked it so much that when I got to likely my last bit of harvesting, I made some more! There was only enough basil for a couple more cubes, but I got almost a full dozen more from catnip.

Another catnip project was drying to make herbal tea. I’ve been enjoying store-bought catnip tea for years, so I thought I’d try to make my own. I didn’t leave them to hang dry long term, just to help dry after the washing. It’s turned out well and definitely a lot more scent than the store kind.

Finally from the garden, I made an infused oil with the last of the catnip leaves like I did with cedar and mimosa blossoms earlier this year. These I mostly am using as hair treatments. I keep a number of small braids with beads and gemstones woven in and it can be damaging, so I take them out on a very regular schedule to wash and do deep conditioning oil treatments—I always used olive oil and now I now I have olive oil that makes me smell like a tree or flower the whole time! It’s become one of my favorite parts of re-braiding days.

I also worked in a little more foraging to make incenses. I’ve liked how they worked out so far (they’ll have a whole post at some point, but I want to use them more first) and I wanted to do some out of mimosa leaves. I read they’re in the acacia family, which has lots of nice properties, and I made an infused oil against stress with mimosa blossoms and honeysuckle accents a while back. I was a bit last on the harvest and so it doesn’t have as much scent as I’d hoped but does seem relaxing. Not sure how it’ll turn out, but I figured anti-anxiety incense could only be good.

I might get a little more catnip from the garden, depending on the frosts, and I’m still hoping to do a bit more foraging, probably for incense plants, before winter really sets in. But I’m thinking of what I have now as my harvest for this year and if weather cooperates for anything further, that’ll just be bonus.

Another Garden Update

I wanted to catch up sharing about the garden before I fall further behind. I’ve been keeping up with my growing things lately still, despite things being so busy.

That geranium I harvested finished drying and it went well. Holly pointed out the potential for dust with the open-air technique I mentioned (and there was a lovely link in the comments of my last gardening post for building a whole system that would be more sterile, so check for that if you’re curious); I just brought it down ASAP to minimize any dust of cobweb time and though I didn’t see any, I hung it outside in the sun and light breeze for an afternoon to blow away any little bit that might have gathered. Then I crumbled it up and sealed it in a closed jar—and I was shocked in the crumbling how very strong the scent was even after drying, which seems good.

Annnnd…I’ve been trolled a little by the garden, it seems. I was so excited for my rosemary, I checked it against the seed packet picture for rosemary, even plant ID app’d it as rosemary—but then it started blooming recently and it’s not rosemary? It’s chamomile. I planted that, too, a few years ago. I’m crazy disappointed because I was excited for fresh rosemary, but also kind of excited anew because chamomile is lovely also and I thought it all died. I’m going to need to make new plans, though.

Lastly, look at this catnip! It popped up huge almost overnight a couple of weeks ago and is still growing, and in the time since other catnip plants about half this size have come up all over the garden. The harvest is looking to be huge! I’m going to likely have enough to do several things with it, so I’ve been looking up ideas and when to collect. Between my three felines and my Cat-associated spirits and that connection being significant in my spiritual practice, I’ll take all of it I can get, but…I’m blown away by how well it’s flourishing.

Harvesting Geranium

I’d meant to do it last week, but I finally got around to harvesting the volunteer geranium plants from my garden like I had planned to do late this week. I had hoped to catch them at the very end of flowering, but they’re mostly already gone. Still, lots of nice leaves and stems, and the taproots—tiny in plants this small, so I’m drying everything together—are supposed to be the most potent part and all those are here and look good and healthy.

So this was the garden before…they’ve gotten so big! And I don’t know if y’all can pick out the rosemary and freshly volunteering catnip plants coming up but wow.

It’s my first time really doing this! I’ve tried to dry some catnip leaves and various seeds before, but had limited success because things either molded/mildewed in the humidity here or simply blew away in the breezes before success. But I’ve been reading up, especially since I planned to harvest the whole plant at once, and it looked like bundling and air drying might be successful. I read you could do bunches as large as an inch in diameter tied together and while I have more plant than I’d expected, it’s not nearly that much so I could put it in a single bundle.

The hardest bit was finding an appropriate place to hang it for the drying. The recommendation was somewhere cool, dark, and not too humid. I also had to think of my extra requirements: a place it won’t be disturbed or in the way of my relations who also live here and someplace my cats won’t get interested and bother it. Not to mention that—by my own push—despite living in the deep south, we try not to turn on the A/C until July or August. (In college, I mostly spent my summers on archaeological sites beyond the reach of climate control and my camper won’t have any air so it seems better not to get used to it and also to save power.)

I found space here, hanging from the rafters of an unfinished room at the back of the house we use one end of as a pantry. Not dark, but it never gets any direct sunlight because of the angles and how thick the woods are out the back windows; and since it’s concrete block, it’s always a few degrees cooler there, sort of like a shallow cave. *rubs hands together excitedly* We’ll see!

I also took the opportunity to weed a little within the garden—including removing these three tiny trees growing from acorns that dropped in over the winter and I missed removing. I don’t know if they’ll survive, but I took them lower in the yard and replant them in an area of similar sun levels where we’re encouraging new trees to grow, so maybe they’ll continue and be future shade for the property. I hope so, anyway. 🌳💚

Seedlings

Hey, check out my garden! Some of the plants are holdovers that came back from the last few years and a couple are volunteers, but my new seeds are already coming up as well now.

Past years I’ve tried to plant before the spring equinox, but after the dedication of the garden wagon at the beginning of February, as soon as the frosts end, so by the equinox the first green will be appearing. That’s the pattern my spirits taught me back in 2016 when I built my wagon, because I’d never really gardened before (outside some yard flowers and an aloe plant when I was growing up). Lots of people seem to ritualize the planting itself but the weather’s different each year and some plants have to be seeded over the winter indoors, so instead we bless the garden with energy at White Spring and then celebrate successful germination at Green Spring six weeks later with planting or transferring new plants outside whenever in between.

I was late and disorganized this year, though. Between the constant rain in the early spring and all the other chaos going on, I had nothing but returns/volunteers by the equinox and didn’t get around to planting new seeds until the weekend after the equinox. And by then I was trying not to go out and so just picked up a few plant between March-May seeds beside the checkout line during an essential grocery store run and hoped for the best. I was so disappointed and felt like a major underachiever at the time, but now I’m really excited; they’re appearing exactly on the timetables from the envelopes and this is the most sprouts from seeds that I’ve ever had come up!

I also had another little rosemary plant come back since I planted so now I have two of them in there. That makes almost as happy, because I’ve come to quite enjoy cooking and baking with rosemary but I hate the sharp, crunchy texture of the dried stuff I bought at the store and I’m hoping to grow enough to try using it fresh instead. I had almost given up hope, thinking this wasn’t a good climate or something for it until my town’s Pagan Pride Day last October (which we hold outside as an evening street fair downtown) when a friend pointed out that rosemary was one of the plants in the sidewalks beautifications and those were huge. I didn’t even know they got that big…so it’s not the weather; it’s me. But I’m reading up and trying to be especially attentive to them this year and maybe they’ll do better.

This is actually probably one of the few cases in my life that isolating at home is maybe helping me. Since I haven’t been going out and about like usual and it’s—finally, thank the Gods—turned nice, I’ve been spending lots of time outside in the yard to keep cabin fever at bay. Most mornings I go out and sit on the step of my camper while I drink my tea and catch up online and yesterday I hung a hammock so I could read out under the trees without worrying about ants or the mosquito zone in that bottom foot or so just above the ground. (It’s only been a day and a half since I put it up and it’s already my new favorite thing.)

From those practices it’s easy to remember to go and check my plants, so I’m using this time to try to form better habits there. Because the sad truth is that probably the main reason my garden hasn’t flourished in previous year is neglect or complications from it. The first year, I think it was a lack of sun because took the wagon back to my clearing in the woods, but the last three years since I brought it back around to the sunny side yard, I just forgot about it. So I hope to use these circumstances now to build batter habits.

And it’s been so uplifting. Going out every once in a while, expecting big changes or a harvest, I was always disappointed, but checking every day a couple times a day I’ve been enthralled and amazed at every little step and how much changes on the day to day. It doesn’t feel like a thing I did to come back months later and receive a product; I’m now invested in wanting every single plant to survive and thrive, checking each leaf for signs of thirst or burn or parasites. I’ve been observing every morning and then watering if it hasn’t rained yet (because the forecasts here have been doing this annoying thing where every day it says tomorrow there will be a nice, steady rain and always pushing it back). It’s something to look forward to every day.