In the garden one can find everything–food, communion, beauty, healing, knowledge and joy. This is a share from my personal garden journal as I teach myself how to tend this space and become a better steward in the world. Hopefully, this photo essay transmits the absolute joy I feel being intimate with plants, and cultivating a living environment in which they, and the insect, bird, reptile and mammalian lifeforms that interact in our garden community can thrive.
An early harvest. I finally got some carrots and a bunch of onions from that set I planted in Delta bed. They all just sort of pop out of the ground when they are ready. Who knew! That was a lightbulb moment. Like this.A bounty. There’s a parsnip on the left. These are so hard to pull up. They are like earth nails, and their leaves, unlike other root vegetables are unpleasant and toxic. Can’t eat them.Tiny carrots and some hard-earned tiny rooty-assed parsnip. Delta bed with the alliums and carrots.Onion and garlic flowers are so delicately beautiful, symmetrical and fragrant. I harvested the seeds. You cut the head off and put it in a brown bag and let them drop. I am going to try for onions by way of seeds instead of sets next season. This allium has already flowered. I learned you gotta catch it when the seeds are still in their little onion packets.Beta bed is quite crowded and not everyone is thriving like I hoped. We have tomatoes and carrots and some squash, as well as the brassicas, but clearly the aha was the calendula flower. Yellow Calendula blooms. Calendula seeds. The lightbulb went off and you can see how the dried yellow flowers are now clutches of seeds. So cool. I harvested a whole bag of them.I did get broccoli and small cabbage leaves that I used and Sir Lancelot eats and I have harvested seeds as their pods dry. Long view of Beta bed.Charlie bed has beans that are growing nicely.My first bitchin bean baby!My Japanese eggplant. The olive tree in this container died. Don’t know why, maybe it got too dry. This is next to Alpha bed and it gets the least water. I put this plant in that container and it was kinda droopy for a minute but it seems to have adapted and I finally have a flower. The Mediterranean herb bed, the Alpha bed and the eggplant on the upper left. Portal between Alpha bed and the Med bed. I happily was able to move the Incarnata milkweed that came back finally! after a year into the aux herb garden that extends the reign of the Med bed. It seems to be good there. Major spud action in all beds but this one in Alpha. I put in some rotting potatoes and now they are huge. No really, I’m gonna have a butt load of spuds if I can harvest them correctly. They are flowering and taking over the Alpha bed.Wilde Childe bed is full. Tomato in the trellis, squash and that is pumpkin to the left. Satvia flower that I thought would do better on the bottom right. Squash.Portal between Wilde Childe and Alpha beds. So much faery activity! Blows my mind really and saves my life. Another view of Wilde Childe garden. I harvested artichokes and left some to flower. It is not as fecundate this season so I will harvest its great great seeds and replant here for next season. Fucking awesome thistle flower. Artichoke!So much faery energy.So much light!I have a watermelon crowded in there but it is not doing well. This baby watermelon did not make it. I put a lot in this small area. I tend to do that. A winner in the Wilde Childe is the yarrow. It loves it here and I have harvested the white flowers and lacey leaves for tea. Closer view of the gorgeous Yarrow. Just got the hanging succulent yesterday. On the left, called Little pickles also known as ruby necklace. The plant arrived and then immediately shed and so I am propagating these. So truly abundant are succulents and also a lot like aliens. Blooms in Wizard Husband’s flower garden.So much faery light!Wizard husband calls these witch sticks. Plant skeletons that I love. Here are last year’s precious artichokes and I also have a variety of interesting dead plant roots that I also love. Compost on the right. I overhauled the compost pile the other day. An entire underworld realm with so many insects, lizards and worms. Compost. That guy who does gardening in Compton who is a God says you know what is gangsta? Compost is gangsta! Yep. Seed harvest. 11 o’clock is the Calendula. So many little hooked seeds brilliantly barbed and designed to attached to animals. Nature’s sacred technology. Very cool. 12 o’clock is radish pods from my ancient radish in Charlie bed that I let grow. Next is daisy like flowers from Wizard Husband’s flower bed that I was about to hack but realized…duh…that dried flowers have the seeds, Sherlock! You can’t see them here but they are fine little strands. Then coriander that I harvested from the bolting cilantro, and then bottom is a beet seed bounty. Here is the grand radish.Here is the coriander seeding up. I have been daily tending the bees who are amazingly somehow not in the bath now because they swarm it all day and as Wizard Husband noted, literally transporting water back to their hives. The rocks are there to make it easer for the bees to access the water without drowning.Hibiscus loves the heat. I am grateful this plant blooms regularly in my garden. If you don’t think plants are about sex then just meditate on this beauty. Sir Lancelot in faery rainbow light next to the Hexengarten where I plant witchy herbs and see what happens.Beans doing well here.Got great chamomile in this garden. I was so used to seeing it stunted as a weed on random streets for years and then behold. Look at it grow to full beauty. This is a lush garden under the lemon tree. On the left is bloody dock, the veined edible leaf next to Woad which is what our ancestors made blue dye from, intermingled with St. John’s Wort.I was thrilled to find the Woad had seeded. Wow.This is trailing Penny Royal that went to flower. This plant seems to be a crawler. This is valerian that came back after a season. I did not harvest it even though the root is medicinal. I just let it go and so I am happy to see it came back in full force. This is Nigella or Black Cumin. I tried last season to get her her to grow but no, so this season I literally sang to her. I gave her a faery ball of light and hope I can cultivate this gorgeous goddess plant.
Namaste to all sentient beings, ancestors, and sacred relations in this time of great transformation! Blessed be the Earth as she feeds us. EnJoy!
