Beginning of the Long Road

This blog is meant to be a garden journal, a spell book, and a catalog of candles I make. I hope it can become much more than that though. My hope for this little corner of the internet is for community, and great ideas, and beautiful pictures. I hope that whoever reads this finds something they can relate to, or some piece of information they were looking for.

The Garden:
My boyfriend (from here on out known as "Z") and I are really excited about our gardens this year. In the past we have only had very limited space for gardening. We had one garden that was about 8'x10' and we have also had the saddest little bucket garden you ever did see. Make sure that if you ever have a bucket garden, you drill holes at the bottom of the buckets. We neglected to do that and the soil (which had chicken manure in it) burned our poor little plants.

Where was I going with all this? Oh yes, so we are excited about our garden this year. We just moved to a new place that has about 800 square feet of garden space (3 separate garden areas). We have plans for a spring/fall garden:

Tilled, composted, and ready to plant!

 a summer garden:

This is a huge area that gets sun all day!

 and a medicinal herb garden:

This is only a third of the space I have for the herbs!

 It looks like no one has touched these gardening areas for years, so there has been a lot of work to do. The past month or so we have been tilling the soil, picking out rocks and weeds and grass, turning it over and adding compost, peat moss, and vermiculite (our soil is very clay-like, so we add the last two to get some air down in the root area and break up the clay). We finished prepping the spring/fall area yesterday and will be planting this weekend!

Spells:
I have not tried any new spells lately. I am trying to set up the medicinal garden in the most energetically beneficial way. I have a stone (earth) at the north end:

 a wind chime (air) at the east:

 a birdbath (water) at the west:

 and a solar lamp (fire) at the south (picture to come). Other than that I have been spending most of my time researching herbs and their medicinal/magical properties, as I am new to the practice of Witchcraft. I will have more than 30 herbs in my medicinal garden which can all be used for magic and healing. I'll be planting all of those in a couple of weeks. Also I'll be posting a list of all the herbs I'm growing along with their uses.

This is a fantastic resource for folklore and magical uses of herbs.

Candle Making:
I made a sand candle today. I incorporated a slice of agate, so that when the candle burns down, the flame will shine through the stone. I'm really excited to try it out! (I will edit this post later with a picture!)
UPDATE: The sand candle did not turn out very well. I was using the wrong kind of wax, and also the sand was too wet.