Part Two: The Growing
This is Part 2 of a two-part series. Read Part 1 here →
My mother always said to have something live in your home that you grow yourself. I heard her say it for years. But I was never disciplined enough to keep up with plants — they would arrive in my home full of promise and quietly fade. I accepted it as just a fact about myself. I am not a plant person.
Then in 2025, something shifted. I had purchased a Poinsettia, and instead of watching it die the way I expected, I watched it live. Months passed. It was still there. Still green. Still growing under my care. It sounds small, but something about that Poinsettia cracked a door open in me.
I thought: maybe I can do this.
I had bought vegetable seeds before — more than once — full of good intentions that never went anywhere. But this time felt different. I started researching. I fell into the world of hydroponics first, fascinated by the science of it, reading everything I could find, watching video after video. The idea that you could grow food with just water and the right conditions felt like a metaphor I wasn't ready to name yet.
Then one day I took seeds from a store-bought pepper, wrapped them in a damp paper towel, sealed them in a zip-lock bag, and waited.
They sprouted.
I stood there looking at those tiny seeds that had cracked open and reached toward life, and something in me cracked open too. A quiet, certain thought rose up:
I can grow things. I can grow into abundance.
Not just plants. Not just food. I could grow things. I had already been doing it — growing a new self from the wreckage of the Tower, growing discernment from grief, growing peace from the rubble of everything I thought I needed. The garden was just the place where I finally saw it happening in front of me.
Not as a formal spiritual practice. Not as a ritual. Just as a woman who wanted something to tend, something living to care for in the quiet of the new life I was building. I didn't know then what I know now: that the soil was already waiting for me. That's what I had been doing spiritually and what I was about to do with my hands in the earth were the same work wearing different clothes.
Somewhere between that paper towel and the first green thing that pushed through real soil, something in me settled. Quietly, without announcement — the way the deepest healings always come.
What the Soil Was Doing That I Didn't Know About
Here's what science has since confirmed what healers and root workers have always known:
When you put your bare hands in soil, you come into contact with a naturally occurring bacteria called Mycobacterium vaccae. This humble organism triggers the release of serotonin in the human brain — the same neurotransmitter that antidepressants work to regulate.
Your grandmother's garden wasn't just feeding her body. It was medicating her nervous system.
But the medicine goes deeper than bacteria.
Gardening asks things of you that are the exact opposite of what anxiety demands:
- Anxiety lives in the future. A garden only lives in the present.
- Anxiety demands control. A garden teaches you to surrender.
- Anxiety says nothing is safe. A garden says: put something in the ground and trust.
- Anxiety exhausts you. Tending something quietly restores you.
Day by day, without me fully realizing it, my nervous system was learning a new way to be.
Rootwork in Its Most Literal Form
Here at Emma & Rachel Conjure, we talk about rootwork — the practice of working with roots, herbs, soil, and the natural world to bring about healing, protection, and spiritual change.
But I want to tell you something:
Your garden is rootwork.
Every time you put your hands in the earth, you are participating in one of the oldest healing traditions on the planet. You are doing what our ancestors did — Black women, Appalachian women, Indigenous women — who knew that the land was not separate from the spirit. Who knew that to tend the earth was to tend yourself.
My brand is named for five women across generations of my family. When I am in my garden, I feel them. Not as memory — as presence. The knowledge in my hands isn't mine alone. It was handed down through generations of women who grew things, harvested things, healed things.
That is the real rootwork.
If you're called to bring that rootwork energy into your home and practice, explore our Root Mother Bundle and Iron Root Conjure Bundle — crafted to support grounding, ancestral connection, and deep healing work.
This Season I'm Growing More Than Plants
I'm in my second garden season now. Tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, luffa, hot peppers — seeds I started myself, watched crack open, watched reach toward light.
The anxiety that used to grip me? It's not gone completely. But it no longer runs the house. My nervous system knows something now that it didn't know before. It knows how to be still. It knows how to wait. It knows that something planted in faith will, in its own time, grow.
If you've been carrying anxiety, heaviness, or that unnamed feeling that something is always slightly wrong, I want to offer you this:
Go outside. Put your hands in the dirt. Plant something.
Not because it will fix everything overnight. But because the earth remembers how to heal you, even when you've forgotten how to ask.
The ancestors knew. The soil knows.
Maybe it's time we remember too.
Sharla Spain is the founder of Emma & Rachel Conjure, a Hoodoo and Appalachian Conjure brand rooted in cultural education, ancestral tradition, and the healing power of plant medicine. Shop ritual products, workbooks, and more at emmaandrachelconjure.com.