 It's harvest season around the farm and that means it's time for garden magic. Hey there saplings! Welcome back to Esoteric Moment! Today we're going to dive into some more magic and I want to talk about garden magic specifically. I know what you're thinking, it's not spring so it's totally the wrong time to talk about garden magic, right? This has always kind of confused me. When I am harvesting things and I am planning on putting all of my food away by preserving it in either canning or freezing or drying that is the time where I practice the most garden magic. I love that people talk about garden magic and plant magic in the spring. It's certainly a time where people feel more inspired to maybe dive into a project they don't do all the time but definitely for me harvest time is garden magic time. When I'm talking about garden magic I am talking about specifically the types of magic that we use when working with soil with plants and fertility in food or plants that we're using for medicinals or you know eating. Fall is the perfect time to think about your fertility and garden magic starts when you think and focus on your soil and compost and fertility. Soil is this crazy magical world. If you look at all of the microorganisms and different bugs and insects and just bacteria and fungus it is such a crazy world. Really easy to think about the concept of as within so without when you're looking at soil and plant health. Soil health that is really high, that's really balanced, that there's lots of diversity in your soil between the plants, insects, all those things I named earlier that type of soil health is what leads to really big, beautiful, healthy and resilient most important resilient garden or medicinal plants and that's what we want as magical workers, as magicians. We want the resilient healthy plants that is going to be most useful in herb work or other spellcraft or our food. Fall is a great time for working on compost. One of the things I'm really lucky to have is that I have livestock so we have chickens and sheep and other poultry. During the winter time we're basically setting up our compost for the next couple years. We do a practice called deep litter. So in the fall the barn gets completely cleaned out and we start with fresh deep straw. This straw then is what absorbs all of the animal manure when they're in the barn immediately. That means all the nitrogen is being trapped right away and there's just a better green and brown ratio. If you're unfamiliar with compost definitely go search a little bit on how to make compost. That carbon nitrogen cycle is really important. Every week or so for our barn we tidy everything up and we put a new fresh layer of straw down and we just kind of keep building up the layer in the barn. Now this might sound gross but the animals aren't really sitting in their own manure. They're sitting on clean straw regularly. Underneath on those bottom layers as things get stacked up you're creating the beginnings of compost. In the late summer fall we take all of this out to the barn and put it into piles where the animals, particularly our chickens, get a new chance at scratching around at it. It gets hydrated by the fall rains which we've had a lot of this week. And then this compost will sit over the winter. Some of it will be applied to our different tree crops, our fruit crops, because those trees won't have any problem with being touching any animal manure that isn't completely composted. There's no transmission of disease between the human food and the animal manure and this process is a great time to inject some magic. I fully recommend creating your own charm or incantation that you can use when you're adding to your own compost. You probably don't get to do it on the scale that I do. You might be able to in the city have a small bin where you keep worms and do a vermicomposting with your kitchen scraps. That's a great time for a little incantation or fertility chant. Maybe you just have a pile or a tumbler in your backyard. Another great time every time you add to it to kind of repeat and ritualize the words that you use about bringing magic and connection into your soil and compost. Fall is another great time for preserving food and when I can things or freeze things I'm always very aware of food safety and my ability not to break jars. If you've canned anything I'm sure while you're making pickles or tomato sauce you have broken a jar or two. I certainly have. I like to use the light body exercise which is pretty common in oba druid circles before I start the actual filling of jar process. This allows me to really focus calm center tap into the kind of greater picture of this really mundane and sometimes excruciatingly hot process. When I can focus and think about that larger purpose it allows me to be very careful and meticulous as I'm filling my jars making sure there are no air bubbles setting them in the hot water bath and it's just a great simple thing to do which helps me preserve more food even more safely. And then the third point of garden magic I really want to tap into is saving your own seeds. This is kind of a magical process in and of itself right. You are planting things in your environment you're caring for them in the ways that you are inclined to care for them. For me that means a relative amount of neglect like we are not pretty gardens with lots of like weeded paths and regular watering we're a kind of thrive or don't type of garden. The plants that succeed and are easy to do this with we like to save seeds. Now in the rush of garden harvest I'm not always able to do a seed saving ritual but when I am I take the seeds that I have collected dried or basically gotten ready for setting aside for next year depending on the plant. There's a great book by the way in the description that talks about saving seeds that if you're interested I would definitely use that resource. Anyway when I have time at the end of harvest season I like to set up sacred space have all of my seeds for the season hopefully already labeled with what year plant and what part of the farm or garden they were located in and then I specifically call on the spirits of place to help me enchant and protect the seeds. It's really easy to use elemental symbols to talk about how I want the seeds protected. For instance with the element of water I'm really looking for the perfect amount of moisture where the seeds can stay hibernating do not dry out but also do not mold and that's a fine balance especially when you're saving your own seeds so it's great to call on that element. With fire I'm really talking about keeping that fertility and energy locked away and vibrant while it's hibernating. For earth I'm really talking about keeping its connection and rootedness in the soil of place where it's from and air that I have the knowledge to work with that plant and seed again next year. Once I've done the elemental workings I again kind of check in with the spirits of place build that energy together and then set my intentions over the seeds. After it releases I think the spirits of place often with a like mixture of some of the seeds or honey kind of my default offering to the spirits of place and I will then add those to my sacred space outside or maybe the compost pile even depending on the mood and feeling of the ritual and then I close my circle as I usually would. I feel like I could talk about garden magic all day long. I really love the workings of garden and harvest time and it's one of the time periods where I feel most connected to jewelry and most kind of aligned to the spirits of place like I'm really bringing in all that abundance and sharing it with my place and my community and my family. I'm hoping that my idea for creating a charm or incantation for working with compost using a grounding or light body exercise before preserving your harvest and a ritual for seed saving really brings inspiration to whatever garden magic you're working. Of course if you don't have tons of land there's always garden magic in pots and if you don't have the money or resources I would really ask you to reach out to your community if you have need and desire for the. In Madison we're really blessed that there's a vibrant community garden network that really helps people connect to nature and gardening and their own food. There are places in my city that will give out small amounts of free compost and many events where you are exchanging seeds or getting seeds for free so I hope you will find those resources in your own community and bring a little garden magic to your life. In the comments below tell me what you're harvesting this time of year. We've had so much rain there are flood warnings almost every day but I'm still starting to get food in so we did our first tomato sauce batch and salsa will probably be in a couple weeks hopefully I'll get pickles done we'll see. I would love and I am so curious to know what food you are harvesting. Today's sad link shout out goes out to itty-bitty Celtic Witch. I will leave a link to her channel down below and in the information tab she does a lot of videos on tarot and Celtic witchcraft. She's a really sweet youtuber and if you haven't checked her out yet you will find her in the comments or over at her own channel. If you want to see more videos about magic spellcraft in Druidry definitely subscribe so that I know this is the type of topic you want me to hang out and chat about with you. Thanks for watching and as always may you find peace in the sacred grove.