Practicing Garden Herb Witchery
My Regular Pagan Holiday Post
Autumn Equinox is September 22, 2025
It felt like fate. On our very first date, a hike in the hills above Muir Beach, Holly and I bonded over plants. She pointed out a lichen growing on an oak tree — Usnea. To identify it, she said, you snap a branch and pull it apart until you see the central cord inside.
Usnea is known by many names: old man’s beard, beard lichen, or beard moss. A sensitive bioindicator of air quality, it only thrives where the air is clean and unpolluted. For centuries, it has been used in traditional medicine to treat wounds and infections. Today it’s still valued — for easing sore throats, helping wounds heal, reducing fevers and pain, even as a possible cancer-fighting agent.
Holly, now my wife, is a witch and an herbalist. She first learned about Usnea from a teacher of medicinal plants, and today her garden overflows with remedies.
The fall equinox — Mabon — is our time to harvest herbs and brew up remedies. Holly stirs up her bite balm, a salve for every kind of skin irritation, while I turn to cannabis. Since I don’t smoke, I’ve studied the alchemy of decarboxylation: gently heating the herb to unlock its powers before infusing it into oils for cooking.
Together we blend teas from garden herbs. Our MoHo Blend we make from nettle, comfrey, and lemon balm. Comfrey mends bones; nettle brims with minerals; lemon balm lifts the spirit. Holly grows native yarrow, too, and last week she showed me how to stop a cut from bleeding: chew a fresh leaf and press it to the wound.
This season, I’m also harvesting and drying figs. Sonoma County is fig country, rich with varieties — Black Mission, Brown Turkey, green Kadota, Adriatic. The fig in our own garden is called Celestial: small, pink-fleshed, and honey-sweet. I can’t resist foraging (with permission) from neighbors’ trees, and the green figs from the tree across the street are my favorite treat.
Earlier in the summer we dried peaches from our little orchard. We peeled and cored the apples that hang over from next door, simmered them into apple sauce and pie fillings for the freezer, and pressed the rest into juice with friends. These harvest gatherings always feel like old-time rituals, neighbors bound by fruit, labor, and laughter.
Our garden is more than soil and stems. It is a living grimoire — a book of green magic — where medicine, ritual, and daily life are entwined. Harvesting and making are rituals of resistance too: an antidote to the anxiety of a world slipping toward fascism. To touch leaf, fruit, and root is to salve our spirits, to root ourselves again in Mother Earth.
