Basil Bliss

This sweet tasting herb is excellent in savory dishes. Basil truly grows like a weed, and you should cultivate it right on the kitchen windowsill so you can snip basil leaves to add to your Thai or Italian-inspired dishes. Give your basil plants plenty of sun and lots of water and you will reap a mighty bounty to share with the neighbors. Old wives and hedge witches claim basil protects while it brings prosperity and happiness to any gardener’s home. Basil helps steady the mind, brings happiness, love, peace, and money, and even protects against insanity. (What more can you want?) The benefits of this plant are as plentiful as the plant itself; it can be used for manifesting and attracting love and on the highest vibrational level for abetting psychic abilities, even astral projection.

Edible Flowers

Organic pesticide-free posies are tasty additions to salads, cake décor, and even savories such as fried squash blossoms. Florals add a stunning beauty to any dish. Grab your basket and add a bouquet to your culinary creations: impatiens, marigold, gladiola, daylily, cornflower, daisy, carnation, and viola. My favorites are peppery, fresh-flavored nasturtiums, which are so easy to grow, have a lovely aroma, and their yellow, red, and orange-bright blooms are the color of happiness.

Let Your Love Blossom: Your Magic Garden

A great relationship can be cultivated, literally. By planting and carefully tending flowers that have special properties—like night-blooming jasmine for heightened sensuality, or lilies for lasting commitment—you can nurture your relationship. During a new moon in the Venus-ruled signs of Taurus or Libra, plant an assortment of flowers that will surround you with the beauty and energy of sweet devotion.

Before you place your hothouse posies or seeds into pots or flowerbeds, bless the ground with a prayer of health for your plants, yourself, and your relationships.

Light a black candle to absorb and dispel bad energy and place it in the middle of a circle you have drawn with a stick. Dip your hand into a clay bowl of water and sprinkle drops behind you and before you. Sing out:

    Great spirit, I offer you this petition.

    Please cleanse this land—you are the greatest magician.

    With my hands, I will plant and sow.

    Here, a healing garden will now grow.

    Blessings to you and to the Guardians of the Earth.

Garden Alchemy: Perfect Plants for DIY Vinegars

The leaves and stalks of the following plants are very good for making herbal vinegars: apple mint, basil, catnip, garlic, mustard, orange mint, peppermint, rosemary, spearmint, thyme, and yarrow.

Dill and fennel seeds work very well, as do lemon and orange peels.

The flowers of bee balm, chives, goldenrod, lavender, and yarrow make for delicate herbed vinegars.

Roots also infuse nicely into herbal vinegars—the best are dandelion, chicory, ginger, garlic, mugwort, and burdock.