Green Witch From Scratch

A first book of green witchcraft for someone who has never done any of it: twenty plants shown on real botanical plates, ten practices taught step by step, and the safety facts for every one of them on the same page.

Green witchcraft (also called kitchen or garden witchcraft) is a practice built from plants, the seasons and the home: growing herbs, making tea and food with a purpose, drying and keeping plants, making small things like sachets and oils, and marking the turning year. This book explains what that means in plain words and then gets you doing it, starting with what is already in your kitchen. It assumes you know nothing, and it never asks you to buy special tools.

Reviews of other beginner books keep returning to the same complaints: too vague, too much history and musing, no pictures to identify plants by, and herb advice without safety warnings. This book is built the other way round.

What you will be able to do

• Recognise twenty plants by sight, by their common and Latin names, using the numbered features on each plant’s plate.
• Grow basil, rosemary, thyme and mint in pots, and harvest them so they keep growing.
• Make ten things: an herbal tea, a simmer pot, dried herbs, herb salt and a kitchen blessing, a charm sachet or dream pillow, a bath sachet, a calendula infused oil, a safer smoke cleansing (and three smoke-free alternatives), a candle practice, and your own herb pots.
• Say what each practice is for in your own words, and keep a notebook of what you made and what happened.
• Know which witch-lore plants never to touch, and the look-alikes that have poisoned people: white umbels and the hemlocks, wild garlic and lily of the valley, bay and cherry laurel.

What is inside

• Start here and How to use this book: what green witchcraft is and is not, what you will achieve, and the order to work in.
• Part 1, What a green witch does: the practice in plain words (with the vocabulary other books use, translated), a realistic first week, the tools you already own, how to turn a vague wish into a useful intention (with a worked example), and a finished notebook entry.
• Part 2, Safe from the start: the five ways a plant reaches you; who needs extra care (pregnancy, breastfeeding, children, medicines, allergies, asthma, epilepsy, pets); why the Latin name matters; a gallery of twelve poisonous plants from witch lore; three look-alike pages; the rules and law for picking wild plants in the US and UK; and essential-oil dilution with a drops table and a worked example.
• Part 3, Twenty plants: basil, rosemary, thyme, garden sage, mint, lemon balm, bay, lavender, German chamomile, calendula, rose, cinnamon and clove, garlic, lemon, dandelion, stinging nettle, yarrow, elder, mugwort and St John’s wort. Each gets a two-page spread: a public-domain 19th-century botanical plate with its identifying features numbered; how to grow or buy it; what tradition says about it (labelled as tradition and belief, never as medical claims); one thing to try; three ways to use it; the common beginner’s mistake; and a five-column safety strip (eat and drink, skin, pregnancy and breastfeeding, cats and dogs, medicines and health).
• Part 4, The practices: ten practices, each with a photograph, what you need, six steps, a drawn diagram, a test for whether it worked, words you could say, and its safety. Then the green year: the eight seasonal festivals with what is growing and what to make at each.
• Part 5, Your first four weeks: a day-by-day plan of ten to twenty minutes a day.
• Quick reference: every plant’s safety on two pages, plants by purpose, printable notebook pages, and the sources.

Safety, sourced

Every safety line was checked against medical, poison-centre and government sources: the NIH (NCCIH and LactMed), the European Medicines Agency’s herbal monographs, the NHS, the ASPCA Animal Poison Control plant lists, the Pet Poison Helpline, poison.org, the Royal Horticultural Society, the US National Fire Protection Association, the National Center for Home Food Preservation and the Tisserand Institute, among others. All are listed in the book. It is not herbal medicine and makes no health claims; where a reader could be hurt, the page says so and says who to ask.

Files

• Green-Witch-From-Scratch.pdf: the book, 102 pages, US Letter, full colour.
• Green-Witch-Print-Pack.pdf: 7 pages to print: the four-week plan, the two-page safety table, and the notebook pages (plant page, practice log, a year page).
• Green-Witch-From-Scratch-Complete.zip: both PDFs together.

Measurements are in US and metric units, and the book covers US and UK readers (laws, poison helplines, plant names).