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Author Topic: Gardening with Paganism  (Read 6470 times)

Altair

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Re: Gardening with Paganism
« Reply #15 on: December 25, 2015, 07:09:06 am »
Quote from: PiscesMoon;183951
I have tried to make our small garden into a space that is welcoming for wildlife


Me too: I grow mostly native plants and let the wildflowers seed out to provide food for the birds (no feeders; since it's the middle of the city, I don't want to attract rock pigeons). This fall I was rewarded by several migrating song sparrows that hung out in my garden for a week or two, refueling on the seeds. The lovely mourning doves (year-round residents) adore the seeds from my switchgrass (Panicum virgatum), and since I grow lots of it, the doves feast.

The big exceptions to the native rule are my butterfly bushes (Buddleia davidii), which flower from late spring until deep into the fall, and are the equivalent to butterflies of crack cocaine! Nothing else, not even the native wildflowers, attracts them like these bushes do. I also grow parsley purely because it's the larval food plant for swallowtail butterflies, and this summer, I was lucky enough to happen to be there when a female black swallowtail fluttered around the parsley leaves, laying her eggs. Sure enough, within a few days I found big, fat swallowtail caterpillars munching away. It's wonderful to have butterflies flitting about here in the middle of the city, and always makes the garden seem more magical.

Quote
there is a pond, (which was here when we moved in) for frogs; I built what was meant to be a winter hibernation space for the frogs, but a family of woodmice took it over :)


Mine is a roof garden, so a pond is out, but I have a naturalistic fountain from/in which the birds drink and bathe. It runs day and night, since one of its functions is to pull in birds flying overhead during migration (the sound of running water will do that).

So yeah. For someone like me whose paganism is nature-oriented, the garden is a godsend. Even if it is crafted by human hands.

Quote

Altair, in your second posting you said that "It burns me when winter weather drives me back indoors for months"... we have built a small summerhouse (glorified shed!) at the bottom of the garden, where I keep a small camping heater- it makes it possible for me to be out in the garden even in winter. If your space is large enough, would that be a possibility for you? I would go barmy if I had to be shut in the house for four or five months of the year!


That sounds FABULOUS. I don't think it would work here; my garden is decent-sized (as Randall notes!) but too small to house an additional structure. Though with the freakish weather in the Northeast this year, it's not an issue; last night I had a late dinner upstairs in the roof garden under a full moon, dressed in a T-shirt...on Xmas eve!

(We have yet to have a freeze here in NYC; I don't grow any evergreens, yet I still have some plants that are still green and growing. And I have *never* left my fountain to run past November, and yet here it is Xmas day, and it's still going strong.)
The first song sets the wheel in motion / The second is a song of love / The third song tells of Her devotion / The fourth cries joy from the sky above
The fifth song binds our fate to silence / and bids us live each moment well / The sixth unleashes rage and violence / The seventh song has truth to tell
The last song echoes through the ages / to ask its question all night long / And close the circle on these pages / These, the metamythos songs

PiscesMoon

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Re: Gardening with Paganism
« Reply #16 on: December 26, 2015, 03:04:59 pm »
Quote from: Altair;184030
That sounds FABULOUS. I don't think it would work here; my garden is decent-sized (as Randall notes!) but too small to house an additional structure. Though with the freakish weather in the Northeast this year, it's not an issue; last night I had a late dinner upstairs in the roof garden under a full moon, dressed in a T-shirt...on Xmas eve!

(We have yet to have a freeze here in NYC; I don't grow any evergreens, yet I still have some plants that are still green and growing. And I have *never* left my fountain to run past November, and yet here it is Xmas day, and it's still going strong.)


It's unseasonably mild here, too. I went out and picked some thyme for cooking, can you believe it? Didn't even need to wear a coat when we walked to our friend's house in the afternoon.

Ah, I did want to see the full Moon last night! Unfortunately it was completely cloudy here, but I did just get a fleeting glimpse of her tonight. :)

Geosmin

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Re: Gardening with Paganism
« Reply #17 on: July 07, 2020, 10:14:08 am »
For those of you with a garden--and by "garden" I mean everything from acres land to a few pots on a windowsill--does your paganism come into play in how you use it? In the gardening you do? (the plants you grow, the arrangement of plantings, the garden decorative tchotchkes, etc.)

I'm guessing this is a no-brainer yes for most of us (esp. the herbalists among us), so please feel free to describe the ways in which your garden plays a part in, echoes, or amplifies your spirituality!

I love that I found some topics on Gardening, Herbalism and some people on here that tie in gardening and taking care of plants to their pagan path...so I'm bringing this post back to life <3

I too have a garden and a bunch of potted plants in my apartment. The garden is about the same size as my apartment, it has 2 lilacs and an apple tree which I love. I just added a Herbal Spiral to the garden last spring, which I built with bricks. It has a little pond that goes along with it. It reflects an aspect of my path with its spiral form, the never ending cycles of life. I grow all kinds of herbs in it like mint, lemon balm, chamomile, savory and rosemary.
I am currently thinking about adding a small altar space to it, which would be perfect because sitting in front of it one is facing north, having the small pond in the west.

I love being outside seeing everything grow and come to life. There are pots with lavender and sage at my back door, which I keep there for their properties. Also, I have just upcycled an old palette to become a bed for lettuce. They are coming along amazing.

I try to reuse everything to have as little waste as possible, which also ties in to my pagan path, to take care of our planet as good as I can.

Oh, and even if my neighbors may not like it, I also have a compost box to make my own fertilizer.

A herbal remedy I use for all my plants, in and outdoor is a nettle slurry. I don't know if its common in the states, or elsewhere to be honest, and I also have no idea if google translated Brennesseljauche correctly. But here in Germany the older folks swear that it is a dream come true for plants immune system and to harden them off for illnesses and pests. Plus, it's a good liquid fertilizer. So I brew that myself, let it set out in moon and sunlight and water my plants with 10:1 rainwater and nettle brew. Haven't seen anything bad happen to them yet :) I hope it stays that way. If anyone is interested in the recipe, I'd gladly post it.

I, too, wanted to take a moment and tell y'all I'm quite happy to have found this forum. It's been a blast this last month reading on here and writing up some posts.

Sincerely, G

(still have not figured out the attachments, or I would have added a pic lol)
.:*:゚。If you truly love nature, you will find beauty everywhere:*。:゚..

Altair

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Re: Gardening with Paganism
« Reply #18 on: July 26, 2020, 06:50:00 am »
I too have a garden and a bunch of potted plants in my apartment. The garden is about the same size as my apartment, it has 2 lilacs and an apple tree which I love. I just added a Herbal Spiral to the garden last spring, which I built with bricks. It has a little pond that goes along with it. It reflects an aspect of my path with its spiral form, the never ending cycles of life. I grow all kinds of herbs in it like mint, lemon balm, chamomile, savory and rosemary.
I am currently thinking about adding a small altar space to it, which would be perfect because sitting in front of it one is facing north, having the small pond in the west.

My fountain is on the east side of the garden, which is counterintuitive to the compass point / elemental correspondences, but makes perfect sense when you see the garden. The fountain sits in the garden's natural focal point, at the base of the tallest feature (a chimney); so it's in full shade for the entire morning, but it glows golden in the late afternoon, when it catches the light of the sun in the west. So to my mind it's oriented to the west, even though it's situated in the garden's east.

In the five years since this thread started, my garden has evolved a bit. Of my 3 trees, two died (the crabapple of old age, and the redbud became rootbound; it seems its natural form is poorly suited for containers, for which its weeping-form cultivar is recommended). I replaced them with a tree-form blackhaw viburnum and a gorgeous Nyssa sylvatica (a.k.a. blackgum / sourgum / tupelo) I inherited from a neighbor. As with their predecessors, each stands sentinel at one of the three access points to the garden, along with the reigning queen of my garden, my best-loved (don't tell the others!) gray birch. I still think of them as maid / mother / crone.

At the recommendation of a pal who's a native-plant gardening expert, I added two inkberry shrubs (Ilex glabra)--do NOT get me started on how difficult it was to get accurate info and source them to make sure they are of opposite sexes! (Otherwise you don't get berries for the birds.) Inkberries are a holly, it turns out, so once I got them I just had to try an oak (!) in my roof garden (!!!), for the pagan symbolism of Oak King and Holly King.

Besides, oaks are a foundational species in the woods of eastern North America, and their leaves host more kinds of native insects than any other tree...so it would boost my efforts to make a mini wildlife refuge. So after a bit of research, I found a dwarf oak species that's native and commercially available: Dwarf Chinkapin Oak (Quercus prinoides). I've embarked on a grand experiment to see if it will make a good container specimen.

(The experiment is off to a rocky start: The first one I got died when a dawdled too long without transplanting it. The second one I potted immediately, and it thrived last summer, survived the winter, and had lots of buds heading into spring...buds that started to leaf out and immediately turned brown and died as they did. I thought the darn thing was dead and even got a weeping redbud to replace it...and then a month later, thank goodness before I uprooted it and dumped it, it sprouted all-new leaves from all-new places. That new growth is doing well, so we'll see...)
The first song sets the wheel in motion / The second is a song of love / The third song tells of Her devotion / The fourth cries joy from the sky above
The fifth song binds our fate to silence / and bids us live each moment well / The sixth unleashes rage and violence / The seventh song has truth to tell
The last song echoes through the ages / to ask its question all night long / And close the circle on these pages / These, the metamythos songs

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