Imbolc? Whoops 10 Days to Late

 Imbolc so named because that is when things give birth and are in milk or so I have been taught. The other reason for the season is cause the days are getting noticeably longer. This time is celebrated as a returning to light, often with candle masses and everything light not to mention white.

Honestly, I don't know why you would want an animal to be pregnant during winter. You have to provide that much more nutrition to the animal to keep it alive and in my mind run a higher chance of the not born yet animal being naturally aborted due to stress from the weather. Then you have the snow issues, most places that get snow this is the heaviest time of year. So you want to now worry about the newly born animal freezing? But what do I know? I haven't run food production animal husbandry farm in any place that has freezing weather.

For me Imbolc or I should say the Month of February is a time of preparation, hope and a bit of anxiety. Around mid-month, aka about right now, I am looking to start seeds inside for the coming growing season. 

The seeds get started inside so that I have a jump on the growing season, but don't have to worry about the little plants getting killed off by a frost. The last frost for my area is typically mid-March. Most seeds take 7 to 14 days to germinate; push their first leaves out of the soil. Then another 7 to 14 days to put on their second leaves. The second leaves are the leaves that look the most like the mature plant leaves and make the plant more discernable from other types of plants.

By starting the seeds inside where I have control over the temperature and allowing the young plants to grow in this manner, I effectively increase my potential yield by "reducing" the growing time. In reality I didn't reduce the amount of time the plant needed to grow; I just reduced the wait time for production in the garden.

However, this year I am thinking that I am going to wait until mid-March time frame to start my seeds.

This is for a multitude of reasons. One being the prediction by the ground hog of 6 more weeks of winter, while many would rather rely on modern weather predictions, I'm gonna go with the critter on this. For the simple reason of they live in homes that are directly impacted by the weather, not my nice climate-controlled home. Waiting may put me a bit behind things, but it does ensure that the plants I do put in the ground have a better chance of not dying from the cold.

The other reason I am going to wait for starting seeds, is simply so I have the most amount of time to increase my growing space as planned. This increase in growing space is going to impact how much of what seeds I am going to start.

So, with all this talk of planting seeds, what's the anxiety? Very simply I am still learning the area I am now living in, and I have a goal for how much food I want to produce for myself. If I was a person living off a farm way back when we claim our neo pagan roots are, this is a very critical time of year. The decisions made now impact the overall yield of the land come harvest time. While I am much more fortunate than my ancestors in that I can just go to the market and make up the difference, I still feel that anxiety when making these decisions.

They were some brave and much more of just about everything I can think of than I am, my ancestors. When they moved from one location to another, they didn't have grocery stores to make up the difference in a crop's yield. 

One of the best ways I have found to celebrate the wheel of the year is gardening or animal husbandry. Both work with the cycles of the seasons and each year builds off the prior. Getting your planning right and yields can go up or allow for short falls. Plan badly and endure shortages. Both also teach you how to manage what you can, plan for what you can't control, and work with what you have. All lessons that do you good in the rest of life's areas.