November musings

Well, November is almost over. Only a little over a week or so to go. I haven't posted here since I put up the picture of my Samhain altar. What have I been doing? Freezing! lol It turned cold here and I've been snuggling in the house in my room. I had central heating until two years ago when it decided to die on me. Since then, I have only a small space heater in my bedroom. I also have one that I run sometimes in the kitchen. It's pretty darn cold in the rest of my house!

My pecan tree decided to finally give up and give me all the pecans. :) I've spent many days of November going out and picking them up. They are delicious! I love pecans. Good thing since I have about 29340392 pounds of them. Actually I don't have that many but it seems like it! I hope to sell some of them. I can always use the extra money.

I re-did the labels for all my herbs recently. I had done hand written labels, but I had wanted nicer ones. I found a template for my windows computer. (I have a Mac and a win box) The template works via Microsoft Word and lets you do a sheet of labels. It will let you do a sheet of the exact same labels, or you can do different ones. I made up different ones. On each, it says "Brook's herbs" at the top in green and then I put the individual herbs under it in black. They look pretty nice. I did one sheet of them and I have put them all on my herb jars. I need to print out some more, but I'm waiting until I can use the whole sheet. I don't want to waste them.

They turned out quiet nicely! I have all my herbs in glass jars in my Witchy trunk. I have most of them in matching jars I found at Dollar General. They look like minature cookie jars. The rest of my herbs are in empty spice, pickle, mini mayo, or other glass jars. I recycle all my little glass jars for this purpose. All the plastic jars I clean out go to the recycle center!

I have been debating whether to put up my Yule tree this year. The tree is packed away in my junk room. I had a hard time getting my Samhain / Halloween goodies out and they weren't as far back in the room as the Yule tree. lol We'll see if I get up the courage to battle that room. If I do, I'll post a picture of the tree here.

The podcast is going quite well! :) I have quite a lot of listeners and get some great feedback. I've been enjoying it so much! I wanted to actually do a podcast tonight, but I have to wait until next week. I'm trying to do them every two weeks so that hosting them won't be too expensive. As of now, I'm paying $5.00 a month and I am almost out of space. I'll upgrade to the next level next month. That will be $10.00 a month. I'm also going to look into way to maybe archive the old shows somewhere else and try to keep it in the $5 - $10 range. We'll see.

Anyway, I hope everyone is having a blessed Autumn.

Playing in the dirt

Yes, you heard that right. :) On Christmas day I was outside in my yard playing in the dirt. Monday was out there again. Why? Well, I am going to plant a herb garden in my yard this Spring. There is a old rose garden in the yard that has only one or two sickly roses left in it and lots of brush. I'm clearing out the brush and digging in the dirt. There are three little cedar trees in there that I am leaving. There is also a beautiful lavender plant. That is staying also. I'm going to replant the roses in another place in the yard.

I have checked out several books on herbs from the library to figure out exactly what herbs I want to grow. I harvest the lavender for my own magical (and non-magical) use every year. This year, I will have many more herbs. I am looking forward to spring! I had such a good time Monday. I was getting so much dirt between my feet and my flip flops, that I took them off and ran around in the dirt barefoot. Luckily it was in the 60's. lol

So that is what I've been doing lately. Playing in the dirt and planning my witchy garden. :) I'll probably plant marigolds this spring too. I have a nice birdbath that could use a border of pretties around it. :)

Herbs

Sometime back, I had said I wanted to be more proficent in astrology. I realized later on that it wasn't what I really wanted to do. What I'd like to learn the most about is herbs. I want to be able to identify them in the wild and know how to collect them, dry them, use them, etc. I purchased Magical Herbalism by Scott Cunningham. I really enjoyed it. I want to get more herbals and learn as much as I can.

As of now, I can identify lavender and that is about it. lol Well, I can identify a lot of other flowers and such, but I want to be really good at it. So, from here on out, I plan to study herbs. If anyone has any recommendations on books or websites, please comment and let me know!