Garden Harvest Magic

Thanks to Gaia and the Green Man
Thanks to the blessed land.
Tend the garden with rakes and hoes,
The harvest basket overflows.

That’s they opening of Garden Harvest Song, which I recorded with my band, the Crow Women. (The link to listen to the song is at the end of this post.) Writing about gardening brings up all sorts of memories for me.

My parents bought their first and only home in 1954. It was a starter home, the kind no longer being built, but it had a big yard. There was room for lots of water-sucking lawn, the socially expected kind now frowned upon, if not out and out prohibited, especially in the desert Southwest where I live.

The yard was my dad’s space. He grew up in a farm family in southwest Nebraska. Gardens were a given. They provided fresh vegetables and fruit in summer and canned goods the rest of the year. Singer-songwriter Greg Brown called those “sunshine in a jar.” Canned goods, potatoes, and winter squash would be stored in the underground storm cellar.

Like his family, my dad had a big garden. I especially remember the tomatoes. They were big! Slices of fresh tomatoes were common on the dinner table. They were luscious. Not the cardboard tasting things you get at the supermarket. I remember the strawberries because I had to help pick them, which required bending over and looking at each berry to make sure it  wasn’t buggy or rotten on the under-side.

We rejoice in the peas and ‘taters,
Zucchinis, beans, and ‘maters.
Seeds we planted in hope and trust,
The gifts of Gaia nourish us.

As an adult, I also had a garden. It was challenging at 8,300 feet elevation in the mountain foothills west of Boulder, Colorado. The soil needed a lot of work. Water was definitely an issue. So was the short frost-free growing season. 

My realities never measured up to those glorious pictures in the seed catalogs that stirred my ambitions in December and January. I can’t remember what produce I got, except I’m pretty sure there was cabbage that I turned into sauerkraut. 

The ex and I moved to northwest Arkansas, a  Mecca for back to the landers, in 1976.  We arrived in early September. The people we were staying with had a large late-stage garden. They were sick of dealing with tomatoes.  I eagerly dived in and began canning tomatoes and making catsup. 

Land was outrageously cheap there and taxes were minimal. So were community services.  It seemed like most families there had gardens because they needed them, as with my dad’s family in southwest Nebraska.

Colors touch the grapes and plums;
We give thanks as sweetness comes.
Harvest is a joyful deed,
The start of luscious wine and mead.

In 1979 we achieved an aspiring back to the lander’s dream of 12.5 acres with irrigation water and an old house that we could move in to immediately. The previous owners had been serious gardeners, so the space was already created.

Skip ahead a couple years and we were back in Colorado, this time the southwest corner of the state. You can drive from red rock desert to high mountains in the same day. We settled in with a family who again had a big garden. They were fellow aspiring back to the landers and hoped to establish a commune. They had irrigation water. The challenge was heavy clay soil and a miniature morning glory-like plant called bindweed that likes heavy clay soil just fine.

The last frost of the spring comes in May or even June. The first fall frost usually comes in October, but it could come in September. So we don’t do long season veggies. Four legged challenges include mule deer and raccoons. 

These days, serious area growers use “high tunnel” greenhouses or geodesic grow domes. Those extend the season and keep the deer and coons out.

Green Man raise the golden grain,
Signal for summer’s wane.
Gather and grind for winter’s bread,
The promise that we will be fed.

I originally wrote Garden Harvest Song for the Lammas Sabbat. It works with a ritual any time during the harvest season, for giving thanks to the deities and spirits of the land and celebrating the bounty of the harvest – veggies, fruits, grains. If you are a gardener or small farmer or like to eat, this song is for you.

Garden Harvest Song is on the Crow Women’s new album Pantheon: Honoring the Pagan Divine. We just released it at the beginning of this month. It’s available on our Bandcamp site. We started recording the songs for that album even before the pandemic started, and have been finishing several songs each year. Now it’s availble, thanks to financial help from our song sponsors. You can see who they were and what they dedicated their songs to on our sponship page. The sponsor for Garden Harvest Song was my bandmate Alane’s daughter, Leigh. She’s at the beginning of her life as a gardening nut. Things have changed a lot since I was starting out on the journey I’ve described in this post. But the love of the land, and Mother Gaia’s bounty, remains the same.

All photos in this post are by Annie Lang

For more information about Carole McWilliams, and links to all the posts she and the other Crow Women have written over the years, please visit the Crow Women bio page here on Pagan Song.

For more articles about harvest season, check out our page for Lammas/Lughnassadh, the first harvest sabbat; our page for Mabon/Fall Equinox (the second of the harvest sabbats): and our page for Samhain/Halloween, the third and final harvest Sabbat. There are songs, rituals, crafts and recipes collected there for you to explore–over 5 years worth of blog posts about harvest music and magic that have been published here on Pagan Song.

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