Seekers and Guides: Garden Magick for Ostara

I don’t know what’s happening where you live, but here in the Okanagan Valley, the grass is growing, the trees are budding, and the bees are out already.  Normally I don’t see bees until Ostara around here but they’ve been out for a couple of weeks now.  Today a good solid rain is falling and I imagine the last lingering survivors of the snow patches will be gone by tomorrow.  So it’s time to think about planting our garden already!  Here’s a few little acts of magick and practical hints you can do to make your garden grow.  Keep in mind that with a few small adaptations most of these will work for community gardens, window boxes, greenhouses or even flowerpots.

Garden Charms

Bless your garden by burying charms in its soil.  Appropriate charms would be:

• Slices of apple cut to display the pentacle
• A Goddess figurine in clay, wood, or other organic material (preferably a fat, happy one!)
• Horns or antlers dedicated to the Horned God
• Solar symbols or crosses
• Whole eggs or Easter eggs (the kind made with food dye)
• Dried fruits or squashes saved from the previous year
• Phallic or yonic symbols
• Quartz crystals, or crystals associated with Goddess/fertility energy (ie. Rosophia, Gaia Stone, Moss Agate, Green Fluorite, Citrine, or Unakite; there are many more!)

Bless and consecrate your chosen item according to your preference.  A quick and dirty way to do this for a statue is to “breathe life into it;” which is to say, blow into its mouth (or face) with that intention!  You can always do a quick elemental consecration too:

“By earth (as you sprinkle it with salt,) by air (smudge, incense, or breath,) by fire (candle flame; don’t burn it!) and by water (sprinkle water on it,) I consecrate you and charge you to your purpose; to watch over/protect my garden and aid in its growth!”

(I generally prefer to add, “By the power of three times three, as I will, so mote it be!”)

Either bury your charms at the four corners of your garden (perhaps laid out according to a circle or a compass round) or, if you only have one, bury it at the center.  Visualize them as both lending their energy of fertility to the soil and the growing plants, and delineating a barrier that pests can’t cross.

Magickal Fertilizer

There are quite a few things that you can sprinkle over your garden space, or mix into your compost or fertilizer, to aid in the growth of your garden:

• Broken eggshells (especially of Easter eggs)
• Wine (especially consecrated wine)
• Mead
• Milk (especially consecrated)
• Wedding or handfasting cake
• Food that has been consecrated in ritual (including leftover Esbat fare, etc.)
• Animal bones from family meals (it may help to clean the bones first and draw spirals, runes, or other magickal symbols on them to bless them and enlist the aid of the animal spirit they belong to)
• The remains of your old Yule tree
• Semen or menstrual blood (use biodegradable material to collect it, such as unbleached tissue or cotton pads)

If you like, speak an invocation as you are adding your “magickal fertilizer.”  Some suggestions:

I call upon the spirits of the earth

And welcome spirits of rebirth

May this garden thrive and grow

Leaf on leaf and row on row!

Or maybe just:

GROW, DAMMIT!

Sympathetic Charms & Statuary

Okay, so maybe you think the garden gnome thing is kinda hokey.  But you know, it’s actually effective sympathetic magick.  Why not attract nature spirits such as gnomes to your garden?  Similar ideas include all those garden decorations of faeries, bees, butterflies, wind chimes, glass witch balls (anti-hex charms,) cute little sayings on resin, wreaths, and icons of deities.

Old Magick

It’s an old charm to bless your garden by sympathetic magick.  If you have the privacy to do so you might want to consider dancing, broom leaping, or sex (in groups, couples, or alone) on or near the garden space!

Deities

If you want to ask for the blessing of a deity in your garden, some appropriate ones may include:

• Blodeuwedd
• Ceres
• the Dagda
• Danu
• Demeter
• Dionysus
• Freyr
• Hermes (as a god of boundaries)
• Inanna/Ishtar
• Inari Okami
• Isis
• Kokopelli
• Kouzin Zaka
• Mars
• Meztli
• Modron
• Osiris
• Pachamama
• Persephone
• Pomona
• Priapus
• Xochipilli
• Xochiquetzal

Please don’t just randomly pick a name from this list!  Do a little research first and find out about these deities before you choose to call on them.  Learn a bit about their pantheons and traditional offerings, and see if there’s anything in their background or history that makes you feel a little odd (for instance, the Mesoamerican deities used to have a penchant for human sacrifice; Dionysus has been known to drive people into cannibalistic frenzies; you get the idea.)

Video: Sit for a Spell Episode 8: Magickal Gardening

Here’s a video I made a couple of years back for my YouTube channel at the Summer Solstice about magickal gardening.  In it, I detail harvesting herbs on the Summer Solstice, gardening with the moon, and a similar charm spell to the one I’ve described to bless and consecrate your garden.  For those who are interested, now that I have some better video software I’ll be taking up making Sit for a Spell videos again soon.  You can find the playlist of the ones I’ve done so far at my YouTube channel.

And just a gentle reminder for those of you in the Southern Hemisphere: all crops left on the ground after Samhain belong to the Fair Folk, so get your harvest in!

---

Hey there!  Jason bet us all we couldn’t get as many Facebook likes as he could, so help me prove him wrong and like the Between the Shadows page!  And don’t forget to check out the Patheos Pagan channel for more great articles.